Dreams that matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination

Dreams That Matter

The publisher gratefully 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 Mittermaier, Amira, 1974–. Dreams that matter : Egyptian landscapes of the imagination / Amira Mittermaier. p. cm. 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. bf1078.m485 2011 154.6'3096216—dc22 2010020056 Manufactured in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 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 Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

On Transliterations and Translations Prelude

Introduction: Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times

xiii xv

1

1. Dream Trouble

31

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

7. Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities

201

Afterword: On the Politics of Dreaming

232

Notes

241

Glossary

265

Bibliography

269

Index

289

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Illustrations

1. Metaphorical dreams: hosting the World Cup in 2010

9

2. Shaykh Nabil at the threshold

59

3. Inside Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine

65

4. Shaykh Saläh al-Dïn al-Qüsï

113

5. A tomb’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

9. A dream booklet sold on Cairo’s streets

210

10. “Allah” on a piece of bread

222

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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. I 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—I shouldn’t forget what a pain fieldwork was at times. The traffic, 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 coffee today, I 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 I 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. I hope this book can stand as a small token of gratitude for their many stories, trust, and friendship. I also owe special thanks to Shaykh Mustafa for all 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, yansüns, and coffees, for allowing me to witness his interpretive and counseling work, and for his sense of humor. Likewise, I am 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

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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, fieldwork 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 for 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 unforgettable hourlong conversations under the stars of Qurna; and `Umar El-Gendy for 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 anthropology 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

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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 Stefania Pandolfo, Charles Hirschkind, Dale Eickelman, and one anonymous reader. Finally, I 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 I am grateful to Alejandra Gonzalez Jimenez for her unfaltering support, her astute observations, and her thorough 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 I 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, Raifa Mittermaier, who offered invaluable help during my fieldwork and is the reason I am engaging with Egypt in the first place. Most of all, I thank my parents for believing in me throughout. It is to them that I 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); from handwritten scribbles (and occasionally drawings) to typed fieldnotes; 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 from classical Arabic, I have largely adopted the system outlined in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. When transcribing from Egyptian colloquial Arabic, I modified the IJMES system slightly to convey a sense of colloquial speech, partly borrowing from the Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic by el-Said Badawi and Martin Hinds (1986). For the sake of readability, I have omitted diacritical marks, with the exception of the `ayn (`) and the hamza (´), for my interlocutors’ names (e.g., Rashid instead of Rashïd). For all other names I mark the `ayn, hamza, and long vowels only (e.g., al-Qardäwï instead of al-Qardäwï). 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. xiii

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On Transliterations and Translations

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Arabic are my own. Again attempting to retain as many traces as possible, I 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-bätin, 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 Qur´anic verses, I 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. All 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. I 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 eyeballs remain in the place where their eyes used to be. Next their shaykh hands them batteries, which they swallow. That’s why they see, I 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. I 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.1 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 afford 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 I 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.2 “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 1

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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 Iraq 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. It 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 I 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 kaläm, “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 of 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.” 3 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 istikhära 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.4 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

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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 self-possessed subject, calling attention to in-betweenness and interrelationality instead.5 Like the widely used phrase in shä´ Alläh (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 awliyä´, and, more broadly, an Elsewhere and the space of the Divine.6 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.7 Dreams are never just about the dreamer. But neither is waking life. Significantly, by the terms imaginary and imagination I 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.8 More precisely, what enables the dream-stories that I retell is an understanding of the imagination (alkhayäl) 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, I use the barzakh also as an analytical tool that circumvents the rule of the either/or.9 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

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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 different 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 1970s. 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 findings 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, I 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.10 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 I 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.11 Dream discourses, like certain Sufi practices, are

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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.12 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—from which different concepts of hospitality, of understanding 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.

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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 supposedly asked his companions every morning what they had dreamed. Muslim dream interpretation finds its roots in the Qur´an, particularly the Yüsuf-sura, and even more so in the hadith literature.13 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 tafsïr (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);14 dreams that mirror the dreamer’s wishes and worries (hadïth nafsï); and divinely inspired dreams or visions (ru´yä).15 To underline the ru´yä’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´yä al-säliha).16 Since the Arabic term ru´yä can denote either waking visions or dream experiences, I 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.17 Dream manuals explain the ways to distinguish one type of dream from 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 ru´yä and hilm (colloquial for hulm) 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. I 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 to the dreamer as opposed to being produced by her. In the words of one Egyptian housewife, the ru´yä is a “dream in which God speaks to you (biykallimik).” Islamic traditions distinguish between literal and symbolic dream-

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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-`Arabï’s Fusüs 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 twentieth 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 (1988), 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. Reformist 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

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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 (haräm), and a shop owner in his forties expressed pity when I 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 (ahwäl nafsiyya) today. The rest is all fake; [Muslim dream interpreters] don’t know a thing.” When I 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 Egyptian television, it is easy to succumb to the impression that dreams have been disenchanted and now simply serve to commodify 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” (Mitchell 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 life,” 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.18 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 television, cinema, computers, and all that comes with them in terms of the experience and conceptualization of reality. While medieval dream manu-

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Figure 1. 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

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churches in Cairo, the Nile Delta, and Upper Egypt.19 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.20 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 “I 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.21 Victorian anthropologist E. B. Tylor, who is credited with introducing the topic of dreams to the field of anthropology, claimed in his Primitive Culture (1871) that “primitives” are unable (or unwilling) to draw a distinction between dream and reality.22 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

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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).23 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 for 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

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strongly in anthropological dream studies. Malinowski, who viewed himself as a pioneer in the application of psychoanalytic theory to the study of “savage life,” argued that the scarcity of dreams among the nonrepressed Melanesians was due to the fact that dreams spring from unsatisfied sexual desire (1953, ix).24 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 defined, 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

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al-Ghazälï (d. 1111) addressed a dream problem very similar to the one Descartes was to struggle with a few centuries later.25 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, alGhazälï complicated the line between dream and wakeful 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-Ghazälï is not to be tamed by human reason; it can itself be a path to truth. Al-Ghazälï’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).26 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 all 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 I 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 I can remember, schizophrenia, depression, hallucinations, and patients’ life 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

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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, I 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 provided 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.”27 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 of his theories that circulate in Egypt or that shape anthropological dream studies, and occasionally, I assume, also my readers’ assumptions.28 Ironically, 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

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unconscious,” I 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.29 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, I 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 of 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, I attempt to trace the landscapes of a particular imagination through attending to my interlocutors’ practices, stories, and vocabularies.

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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 effective painkillers. Imaginary Maps, The Imaginary War, and Imaginative Management Control 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.30 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.31 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 belief in fantastic beings is caused by an imagination turned loose. The imagination, according to this view, is dangerous.

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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.32 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).33 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. 34 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: I am the letter he is reading; I conjure myself from that look of attentive reader; I am the walls of

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his room that watch him from all sides and hence do not ‘see’ him. But I am also his gaze and his attentiveness, his dissatisfaction or his surprise before the letter. I am not absolute master of what he is doing, I am what he is doing, I 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 modality 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 Maranhão (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. Maranhão 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 gä lï fi-l-manäm (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-khayäl, 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, according 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.” 35 For Shaykh Qusi, visions

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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-`Arabï (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 (al-khayäl) and fantasy (al-wahm). A Qur´anic healer defined the former as being an “image from the Real (süra min al-haqq),” whereas fantasy implies “if only (yä rayt).” The dream-vision comes from alkhayäl; 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´ï´i bal huwa ha´ï´i).” Shaykh Qusi differentiated 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

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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-khayäl. I don’t run after mirages (saräb). It’s not fantasy (wahm). Something happened for real.” The man speaking these words had just told me about his visit to al-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï’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-khayäl. Instead of reclaiming al-khayäl as a form 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 ongoing 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-Qähira in Arabic, “the victorious one.” Clearly, it had been victorious; I 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

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during my proposal defense. I would go and find dream interpreters there, I had said. What had I been thinking? A seductive subject in theory, the dream is a frustrating object of ethnographic inquiry. Dreams are highly evasive, and they resist the anthropologist’s desire (and presumed obligation) to observe. It 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. I 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 I 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 fieldnotes, 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 Amrïka. 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

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interlocutors, particularly Sufi shaykhs, who claimed that I 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 I was driven by an abstract interest in the topic, a platonic love for dreams, if I had come only to study them, then I was highly suspect. At best I 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, I 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 Sufis alike, and her presence allowed Egyptians to place me and counterbalanced my affiliation 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 I refer to as my “interlocutors” throughout this book. It is not only because of its unpleasant political connotations that I avoid the more commonly used term informants. I also want to emphasize that my conversations and relationships were more dia-

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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, I 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 for the stories that my interlocutors did 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 I was chatting about miracles with a relative, who is an imam and a member of the Shädhiliyya Sufi order. We had just marveled over how al-Shädhilï (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 I should proceed with rational arguments, he continued; otherwise they would say that Islam is all about superstitions (khuräfät). 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 (hijäb) 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.36 As the following chapters repeatedly return to these four key interlocutors, I 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

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shrine in which Ibn Sïrïn (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. I 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 Marlboros 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-Imäm 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-Ghazälï, al-Qushayrï, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Bukhärï, and al-Tirmidhï. 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 1990s they have formed a community called al-Ashräf al-Mahdiyya (the Guided Honorables). 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.

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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. I 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, I 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.

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My fourth key interlocutor, Shaykh Mustafa, 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. I, 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 Sufism—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 (Hoffman 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 ilähï). As a young Sufi from Luxor put it, true knowledge “does not come from lines (sutür) [in a book] but from hearts (sudür).” 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.

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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, I was presented with only representations of dreams. One could say, as Michael Gilsenan has with regard to miracles, 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 far 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 experiences. 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.37 I 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, I 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 anthropologist is not the ultimate arbiter of the “real,” and that the way this

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category is commonly used tends to erase other forms of relevance. Thus, even though skepticism is not the exclusive privilege of outside observers, I 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 interlocutors’ 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. I 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 I woke up with two big scratches on my left cheek after dreaming of having gotten 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 I 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 fields 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-khayäl, 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, I 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

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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 I zoom in on the ru´yä and address my interlocutors’ understandings of perception. By complicating the meaning 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, I 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. I 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

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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. . . . I 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, 1 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 mahdï 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 mahdï . . . and a dream. 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 mahdï is a savior who will restore true Islam at a time of decadence and decay immediately preceding Judgment Day.1 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 (khärig `an al-`aqläniyya).” 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

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dom people on the street and at work. “Bring me a single person who has seen me interpret the dream and not just heard 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-ghaybiyyät) to “the masses.” Ru´ä, 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 Sïrïn’s dream manual from one of their shelves or out of their bedside drawer or, alternatively, they would begin talking about Ru´ä. 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´ä 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´ä as a perfect example of 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 Ru´ä 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 interpretations. Like her, many of my friends were excited about the program, and I, in turn, found their excitement reassuring during those first few weeks of fieldwork. Ru´ä 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 I was to watch Ru´ä myself for the first time. I settled onto a sofa in front of the television in the apartment that I was renting in Mohandeseen. I had inserted a videocassette into the recorder and sat waiting with a cup of Nescafé, notebook in hand. The evening

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passed, and Ru´ä 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 mahdï began circulating, accompanied by the Azharite decree against mass-mediated dream interpretations. Ru´ä’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.”2 Multiple religious and secular discursive regimes converged in the attempt to ban dream interpretation from the public sphere. Among Ru´ä’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 Affairs. 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.3 Although the Egyptian state and al-Azhar are not always neatly aligned, in the debate around Ru´ä their positions overlapped.4 The Azharite decree stated that dream interpretation on television was dangerous “because it can cause confusion or anxiety (balbala) in the public opinion,” and the Ministry of Religious Affairs declared Ru´ä to be a form of “idle talk” and claimed that “there is nothing in the Islamic religion that confirms the idea of dream interpretation.”5 For this reason, the ministry insisted, the TV station should replace Ru´ä with a different program, which was to “deal with religion and morals instead of dream interpretation and intrusions into the Unknown (al-ghayb).”6 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 Ru´ä, others had long rejected the

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program, complaining either that the shaykh always had the last word on the show, or worse: that he was a charlatan. One newspaper criticized Ru´ä 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-Gumhüriyya 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 mahdï arising right at a time when the Muslim community was facing such grave dangers.7 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´ä 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 I 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, I first turn from the Ru´ä 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,8 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

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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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï (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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï 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, alImäm al-Shäfi`ï was directly related to the Prophet Muhammad.9 He is revered as a saint in Egypt and believed to serve as a defendant on the hidden court of saints (al-mahkama al-bätiniyya). For decades Egyptians have been sending letters to the saint to ask for his help or intercession. Having read about the letters, I had come to the shrine to find out about the saint’s means of responding to these many requests.10 Since most of the visitors were absorbed in prayer or busy talking to the saint, I decided to ask the imam in charge of the mosque about al-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï’s preferred mode of communication. Upon entering the imam’s office, I noticed Ibn Sïrïn’s dream manual on his desk, next to classical hadith and tafsïr 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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï,” 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-Imäm alShäfi`ï is dead,” he said, “so how could anyone still see him?” To emphasize al-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï’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 (fï rahmat Alläh), which would have implied that death is not an end but rather an awakening.

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I was thrown off by the imam’s response and began wondering whether Ibn Sïrïn fulfilled 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 Sïrïn, 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 in a 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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï 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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï, complaining to him and asking for help. They do it only out of ignorance. Of course al-Imäm [al-Shäfi`ï] 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] “I am 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 (yastanïr al-`uqül). And of course the mind tells you that it’s wrong. That he’s dead. That he won’t solve your problems for you.

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From a reformist point of view, the dead, including the Prophet and the awliyä´, are truly dead; mutual visits and conversations between the dead and the living are impossible. To underline this point, reformist thinkers often cite a Qur´anic verse stating that “behind those [who leave the world] there is a barrier [of death] (barzakh) until the Day when all will be raised from the dead” (23:100).11 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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï 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´ä’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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï’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.”12 At al-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï’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,

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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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï 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 `Aqïdatï 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].”13 Shaykh Hanafi’s televised interpretations, by contrast, were reaching an entire TV audience, and the announcement of the coming of the mahdï (and thus of the impending end of the world) concerned all Muslims, if not the world at large. The terms daggäl and sha`wadha are used widely in the Arabic media, the former meaning “swindler,” “cheat,” “imposter,” “quack,” or “charlatan,” and the latter “magic,” “humbug,” “swindle,” or “trickery.”14 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

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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 I brought up dreams; others spoke to me about magic spells, drew amulets, or took me to Qur´anic healers or zär rituals.15 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 (qirä´ät al-ghayb),” magic, and the treatment of spirit possession.16 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.17 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-jamä`ï)”? 18 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 (tathqïf) and enlightening (tanwïr) people.19 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 supernatural 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.”20 A newspaper from the Emirates blamed the increase in charlatanry on a feeling of despair, insufficient religious knowledge, and shortcomings in the educational structure.21

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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 reaffirm the “good Muslims.”22 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,23 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 offered 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

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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” (146f.). 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.24 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.25 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

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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-Manär received a letter inquiring whether Joan of Arc should be considered a prophet. Rashïd Ridä, 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). Ridä 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 Ridä 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). Ridä 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. Ridä 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 Ridä, Joan of Arc was not a prophet, but neither were the modern messianic leaders of Islam, such as Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself mahdï in Sudan in 1881 and declared a jihäd against the Ottoman rulers; Bäb, 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. Ridä 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 mahdï-like figures. Although Ridä was more conservative than other Salafi reformers and

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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-Afghänï 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. Ridä noted that whereas the concepts of reason, thought, consideration, and deliberation are absent from the Bible, the Qur´an mentions the word mind (`aql) more than fifty times (1996, 107). When Salafi thinkers emphasize Islam’s inherent rationality, they do not necessarily embrace European models of reason. As Talal Asad (2003, 221f.) 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.26 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 favor 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, Ibn 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 Qur´an and sunna. Ridä 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. Ridä, `Abduh, and al-Afghänï 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-Manär wa-l-Azhar, a book that Ridä 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

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body while reading al-Ghazälï’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 Naqshabandiyya order, he saw the Prophet, Abü Bakr, and a shaykh of his order in a state between sleeping and waking (Ridä 1933; cf. Sirriyeh 1999, 99). Although Ridä 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, Ridä 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-`Arabï about what happened to him after his death. Ibn al-`Arabï confessed in the dream that he led many people astray in his life because he was confused about the imaginal world (155).27 It is ironic that Ridä provided imaginary proof to disprove the importance of the imaginary 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, Salafi 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,28 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-Bannä, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, stressed in

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his Risälat al-Ta`lïm (Thesis of Education) that Islam is a rational religion, a religion that “frees the mind (yuharrir al-`aql)” (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-Bannä’s take on dream-visions and divination was later echoed by Yüsuf al-Qardäwï, 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-Qardäwï explains that Hasan al-Bannä’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 (dalïl). This is a clear error and a big mistake” (1996, 11). Again, “excessive Sufis” are here criticized for overvaluing their experience and for mistaking their dream-visions for a form of revelation. Yet like Ridä, al-Qardäwï 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 [literally: 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-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï’s mosque drew on “modern science” to discard the masses’ “backward” beliefs, al-Qardäwï 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-Qardäwï tries to contain their effectiveness. Dream-visions, he warns, can never qualify as evidence.29 He explains that if one learns through a dream that a specific witness has lied, or that money was stolen, or that water is impure, none of these findings matters in reality as even

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the Prophet always judged based on visible facts (al-zawähir) and not based on what God had revealed to him. Offering an example of what can happen when dreams are mistaken for evidence, al-Qardäwï cites an article from the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahräm, according to which a judge changed the date for local elections because of a dream-vision he had seen. “This way,” al-Qardäwï 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 ethical potential, it is not surprising that al-Qardäwï responded to the Ru´ä debate in the form of a rhetorical question: “And why should we care about dream-visions? (fa-mä bälunä bi-l-ru´ä al-manämiyya).”30 In the wake of the debate a fatwa was also issued on Islam Online, a bilingual Web site initiated by al-Qardäwï, 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-`A zïz Äl 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

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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 `azïm).”31 In an article in an Emirati newspaper, published a few months after Ru´ä’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 (iftirä´) 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 fear God!”32 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 (al-ghayb) save God.” (27:65) Say [o Prophet]: I 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 I say unto you, “Behold, I am an angel”: I but follow what is revealed to me. (6:50)

Salafi 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 verifiable 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-

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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 interpretation is a lawful matter (amr shar`ï) that is proven in the Qur´an, the sunna, and the sayings of the ancestors (al-salaf).”33 Similarly, Shaykh Hanafi defended Ru´ä 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.” 34 Unlike the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Affairs, which requested a religiously sound program “instead of” Ru´ä, 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 mahdï 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 Sïrïn 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.” 35 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 from a shaykh of the Bayyümï 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 professoriate. 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 Ru´ä’s discontinuation he claimed, “If 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.”36 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 Sïrïn, Ibn Shähïn, and al-Näbulusï, hadith collections, classical works of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), al-Ghazälï’s and Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawzï’s writings, and Kitäb al-Hayawän, 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

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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´ä 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 Ru´ä “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 of God and the issues of their community (umma).”37 For Shaykh Hanafi, far from being un-Islamic, dream interpretation is his duty as a Muslim.

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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´ä’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 Rashïd Ridä’s dismissal of different messianic leaders who claimed to be divinely inspired. Ridä could have used many additional examples. The founding of the Ottoman Empire was supposedly inspired by a dream seen by Osman. Shaykh Mansür, 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 mahdï’s arrival that had been revealed to the insurgents’ leader by way of a dream-vision.38 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.39 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 dreamers to concrete actions such as visiting the saints, distributing alms, or joining a Sufi order. Practices and experiences of the imagination can have powerful 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 jihäd or da`wa. Jihäd in this context implies neither a holy war nor an inner spiritual struggle but a constant striving to heighten the Muslim community’s

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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 self, political awareness, and correct religious practice. It is a form of jihäd. 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. Träume sind Schäume, 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 rationalistic and 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, I began with an end in this chapter. Ru´ä’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 forms. The possibility, reliability, and relevance of dreamvisions were debated by al-Azhar, the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Affairs, Saudi scholars, journalists, sociologists, psychologists, laypersons, and at least one disappointed anthropologist and her friends. The Ru´ä 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, I have examined how, why, by whom, and to what effect these questions were being discussed with such urgency.

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Ultimately, the debate points to a broader remapping of Egypt’s religious and imaginary landscapes. While seemingly trivial, Ru´ä’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 focus of this ethnography. Why then, one might ask, begin a book on dreams and imaginations with the end of a dream interpretation program? I 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

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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 from 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, reformists, 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 Ru´ä or consult locally known dream interpreters. The next chapter is devoted to one such dream interpreter: the guardian of Ibn Sïrïn’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 Hanafi’s story, too, does not end where I left off earlier. Only a few months after Ru´ä 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 from 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 Hanafi’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 lifeboat between this and that. Your words are the sails. William Burroughs

Ta`bïr [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 Sïrïn 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 Sïrïn’s mother was a slave of Caliph Abü Bakr, and his father was taken prisoner in Iraq during the first Muslim conquests and later freed by Caliph `Umar.1 Born in Basra, Iraq, in 654, Ibn Sïrïn 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.”2 Besides being a merchant, scholar, and hadith transmitter, after his death in 728 Ibn Sïrïn retrospectively became best known for his skills in dream interpretation.3 Countless times during my fieldwork I was advised to read Tafsïr al-Ahläm (Interpretation of Dreams), a book supposedly written by Ibn Sïrïn that is available in most of Cairo’s bookstalls, next to cheaper, abridged paperback versions. The fact that Tafsïr al-Ahläm, as well as dozens of other dream manuals, might have been wrongly ascribed to Ibn Sïrïn 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 Sïrïn has practically become synonymous. Ibn Sïrïn is the Muslim Freud. And quite frankly, 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? Allü? Ibn Sïrïn. Kallimïnï! Beep. “Hello? [This is] Ibn Sïrïn. Call me,” my answering machine says. I pick up the phone and return Shaykh Nabil’s call. I tell him I’ll stop by shortly. While often dreading the thought of 54

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having to leave the house again after a long and tiring day out in the city, I could rarely resist the magnetic pull of Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine. Shaykh Nabil has been in charge of the small shrine for the past thirty years, and like Ibn Sïrïn, 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.4 After almost two months of futile attempts to locate the shrine’s site, I 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 Ibn Sïrïn 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 Ibn Sïrïn. 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 glass 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 Sïrïn 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 Ibn Sïrïn’s background while evading all questions about his own work. He seemed friendly yet slightly suspicious. When I returned to the shrine a few days later, he received me more warmly and told me that he had seen a dream in which I was wearing a school uniform and he pushed me onto the “right path (al-sirät al-mustaqïm).” He explained that the dream meant that he should help me, and soon thereafter he began referring to me as Ibn Sïrïn’s student (talmïdha) 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 Sïrïn. I was looking forward to learning from him and, through him, from Ibn Sïrïn. The relation between the two dream interpreters is a complex one, to say the least. Ibn Sïrïn died in the eighth century; Shaykh Nabil lives in the twenty-first century. Yet they are intimately connected. Depending

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on whom he talks to, Shaykh Nabil might emphasize his blood ties to Ibn Sïrïn’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 Sïrïn’s family, which makes him an extension of Ibn Sïrïn, occasionally allowing for a full collapse of their identities (“Hello, this is Ibn Sïrïn”), and at other times for a partial identification (as “the little Ibn Sïrïn,” which is how an Egyptian magazine, alShabäb, refers to the shaykh; or “Shaykh Nabil Muhammad Ibn Sïrïn the Egyptian,” which is how Shaykh Nabil likes to sign his letters). Frequently the shaykh calls himself Ibn Sïrïn’s grandson and successor (hafïdu wa khaliftu). Spiritually inclined Egyptians do not take the claim to an actual blood relationship too literally. Hassan explained to me that Ibn Sïrïn is Shaykh Nabil’s “grandfather” just as al-Sayyid al-Badawï, 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 (sähib al-maqäm),” Shaykh Nabil is connected to Ibn Sïrïn 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 Sïrïn, albeit a modernized version, as he himself likes to emphasize. He told me that he brings Ibn Sïrïn “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 qiyäs, the legal and interpretive method of analogical reasoning, Shaykh Nabil decodes the meaning of symbols that Ibn Sïrïn 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 Sïrïn’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 I 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.5 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

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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.6 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 also full of utopian potentials (Douglas 1966; Gennep 1960; Stoller 2009). Victor Turner called the limen, or threshold, “a realm of pure possibility where novel configurations of ideas and relations arise” (1967, 97). Similarly, in the work of the medieval Muslim thinker al-Ghazälï, the dihlïz, 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 dihlïz. 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`bïr 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

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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 dihlïz, 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`bïr, the term tafsïr, generally associated with commentaries on the Qur´an, is used to refer to the interpretation of dreams.7 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 Qur´anic exegesis, an interpretive subculture or enclave. Al-Ghazälï, in his Jawähir al-Qur´än, explicitly likens one hermeneutical process to the other: “Know indeed, that interpretation [of the Qur´an] 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 I 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. Ibn Khaldün lists it as one of the “sciences of the religious law” (1967, 367) and, according to al-Näbulusï, 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 Yüsuf (Joseph) as the father of Muslim dream interpretation because, according to the Qur´an, God taught him the “interpretation of dreams (ta´wïl alahädïth),” and he subsequently interpreted the dreams of two prisoners and the pharaoh (12:101, 36, 43). Alternatively, the Prophet Muhammad

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Figure 2. Shaykh Nabil at the threshold of Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine.

is praised as the first Muslim dream interpreter, and his interpretations of specific dreams are recorded in hadiths. Abü Bakr, a companion of the Prophet and the first caliph, was known to interpret dreams, and so was Asmä´, Abü 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-Khalläl composed a biographical dictionary titled Tabaqät al-Mu`abbirïn (The Classes of Dream Interpreters), no longer

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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 Shähïn (d. 1468), al-Näbulusï (d. 1731), and of course Ibn Sïrïn. The texts that are ascribed to al-Näbulusï and Ibn Sïrïn 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 Sïrïn’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” (Näbulusï 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 I 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´wïl al-asmä´), based on the characteristics associated with the objects (ta´wïl bi-l-ma`nä), by the Qur´an, by the hadith, by proverbs, through opposition or inversion (bi-l-didd wa-l-maqlüb),

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through increase or decrease (bi-l-ziyäda wa-l-naqs), based on what time the dream was seen (bi-l-waqt), 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 symbols 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.8 Because of the Qur´anic verse “they [women] are as a garment for you [men], 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 Yüsuf’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 (thaqäfa) 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 (qiyäs), to relate words to similar-sounding ones (tashbïh), and to derive meanings based on the words’ roots (ishtiqäq).9 The name Rashïd, for instance, can be interpreted as guidance (irshäd); marriage (jawäz) in a dream symbolizes the overcoming (tajäwuz) 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 (mä yajrï `alä lisän al-näs).” 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

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dream should not be interpreted. Supposedly, Ibn Sïrïn 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, Ibn Sïrïn also relied on nonverbalized impressions: Once a man came to Ibn Sïrïn and asked him to interpret a dream in which he had seen himself perform the call to prayer (yu´adhdhin). Ibn Sïrïn 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. Ibn Sïrïn interpreted the dream to mean that the dreamer would steal and his hand would be cut off. Both interpretations came true. Someone asked Ibn Sïrïn why he had interpreted the same dream in two different ways, and he responded, I 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]. I saw the second man’s face as ugly and I took it to mean that he would steal based on the verse “A herald (mu´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 Sïrïn did not simply listen to what the dreamers told him about their lives; he also looked into them through the skill of firäsa, 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 (`afïf 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 (haläl) 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 shä´ Alläh ([something] 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-

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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 of 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 tactfulness” (Akili 1992, xxiii). Both of the interpretations given in this story point toward the same future. Yet they provoke opposite reactions. 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 I met or heard about in Egypt are male, and they are called shaykhs. As we move from the textual ideal type to Ibn Sïrïn’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 Nafïsa mosque. After paying al-Sayyida Nafïsa a quick visit, they continue their way down a little street known as Al-Ashräf Street. Al-Ashräf 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 with a

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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-Ashräf Street is a small street after all, seemingly like any other small street in Cairo. Yet Al-Ashräf 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,10 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 Ruqayya, al-Sayyida `Atïqa, Muhammad al-Ja`farï, and Muhammad al-Anwar.11 Thus the name of the street: alashräf refers 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 alImäm al-Husayn, al-Sayyida Nafïsa, 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 Sïrïn’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 (maqsüra), 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 (täbüt). 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: Ibn Sïrïn, who died in Basra but who, according to Shaykh Nabil, is buried here in Cairo, and Shaykh `Abd al-Ghanï `Abdullah al-Baläsï, 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 Sïrïn’s shrine, the presence of the dead contributes to a peaceful and joyous atmosphere.12 Whenever the birthday of Ibn Sïrïn or one of the other saints buried in the neighborhood approached, Shaykh Nabil’s eyes sparkled, and he spoke with

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Figure 3. Inside Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine.

excitement of the celebration that was about to happen. Ibn Sïrïn’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 Mutawallï al-Sha`räwï and Shaykh

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Sälih al-Ja`farï, 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 ahl al-bayt. Over the small mihrab, in green paint and with yellow shading, Shaykh Nabil has written Allähu Akbar (God is great), the Prophet’s name, and the names of the first four caliphs: Abü Bakr, `Umar, `Uthmän, and `A lï. On other walls, in the same colors, one finds sayings that are popular among Sufis, such as “The one loves God who loves Husayn (ahabba Alläh man ahabba Husaynan),” and a poem composed by Hassän Ibn Thäbit, who lived at the Prophet’s time and wrote eulogies for him and who, according to Shaykh Nabil’s version of history, was Ibn Sïrïn’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 from the neighboring coffee shop, which are placed in a half-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.13 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 façade of al-Sayyida Ruqayya’s nearby mosque.

“Al-Sayyida Ruqayya 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 (insän `ädi basït) 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 Sïrïn’s mother, but his own father, maternal uncle, and brother were also “hidden saints (min awliyä´ al-bätin).” 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

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own childhood experiences might not have been that normal after all: “It started when I was young. I was seeing. I was seeing everything when I was young. Like that. But when I began telling people, it got less (ikhtaffat `annï). I 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 (asrär ilähiyya).” 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 (basïra) at times overpowered his optical vision. The spiritual calling that he received later in his life was prefigured 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 (intimä´) 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 life changed drastically. A dream-vision commanded him to open Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine across the street from al-Sayyida Ruqayya’s mosque. Al-Sayyida Ruqayya was the daughter of `A lï, 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 Sïrïn’s shrine never became entirely clear to me. He told me that al-Sayyida Ruqayya’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 Ruqayya or, more precisely, through the “hidden court (al-mahkama al-bätiniyya),” 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 (ahl al-bayt). They said, `Al-Sayyida Ruqayya wants you (`ayzzäk). [This is] the secret appointment (al-taklïf al-bätinï).’ [I said] ‘Why does she want me?’ They said, ‘Open your grandfather’s shrine!’ ” This short and rather simple dream-vision was recurrent, and Shaykh Nabil obeyed the order. He opened Ibn Sïrïn’s

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shrine, which, according to him, prior to that moment had been closed and was slowly deteriorating.14 Today Shaykh Nabil is not only the shrine’s guardian but also keeps Ibn Sïrïn’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 Ruqayya who gave him what he calls a gift (`atä´), or the blessing of interpretation (na`mat al-ta´ wïl). 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 Yüsuf. 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. Ibn Sïrïn himself, according to classical sources, was informed of his calling through a dream encounter with the prophet Yüsuf: 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 [Yüsuf].” 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 I could see it in the palm of my hand. (quoted in Lamoreaux 2002, 22f.)

Once Ibn Sïrïn was able to see Yüsuf’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 Sïrïn’s calling involves a slightly different version of the dream-encounter: “[Ibn Sïrïn] 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, Ibn Sïrïn received the gift of dream interpretation directly from the prophet Yüsuf; 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

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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 khälis).” When I called Shaykh Sayyid, he answered, introducing himself as “Shaykh Sayyid Hamdï Ibrahïm, the dream interpreter (mufassir al-ahläm).” During our first meeting, Shaykh Sayyid told me that he had grown up in a small village between Qena and Luxor, and at the age of ten had dreamed that the prophet Yüsuf 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 defines 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 (ilhäm), he later studied dream interpretation books. Among the texts he considers important are the classical writings of Ibn Shähïn, Ibn Sïrïn, and Ja`far al-Sädiq, as well as the hadith works by al-Bukhärï, Muslim, and al-Tirmidhï. 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`bïr alManäm wa Tafsïr al-Ahläm (Dream Interpretation); al-Ru´ä wa-l-Ahläm (Visions and Dreams); Al-Mar´a fï Ta`bïr al-Manäm (Women in Dream Interpretation); Ru´ä al-Nabï fï Ahläm al-Sahäba (Visions of the Prophet in the Companions’ Dreams); Al-`Ilm wa Tafsïr al-Ahläm (Science and Dream Interpretation); Ahkäm Tafsïr al-Ru´ä wa-l-Ahläm fï al-Qur´än al-Karïm wa-l-Sunna (Rules for the Interpretation of Visions and Dreams in the Qur´an and the Sunna); and Ashhar al-Ahläm fï al-Tarïkh (The Most Famous Dreams in History). Like Shaykh Sayyid, Shaykh Nabil claims to have received his interpre-

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tive skills as a divine or saintly gift, but he too grounds his practice in specific texts. He is intimately familiar with Ibn Sïrïn’s work and often reads the Qur´an 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´wïl al-Ahädïth: Nafahät min Maqäm Sïdï Muhammad bin Sïrïn Mufassir al-Ahläm (The Interpretation of Dreams: Fragrances from the Tomb of Muhammad Ibn Sïrïn the Dream Interpreter), it lists as its references the Qur´an, Ibn Sïrïn, Qisas al-Anbiyä´ (Stories of the Prophets), Ibn al-`Arabï’s Fusüs alHikam (Seals of Wisdom), al-Sha`ränï’s al-Tabaqät (Classes), Ibn Kathïr’s al-Bidäya wa-l-Nihäya (The Beginning and the End), Sigmund Freud’s al-Tahlïl al-Nafsï (Psychoanalysis), al-Imäm Mälik’s al-Muwatta (The Approved), and Muhammad Qutb’s Dalïl al-Hayrän fï Tafsïr al-Qur´än (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 awliyä´ or Ibn Sïrïn. Ultimately, he told me, divine inspiration (ilhäm) is much stronger than studying (diräsa). Echoing Ibn Sïrïn’s initiation story, Shaykh Sayyid (at the age of ten) and Shaykh Nabil (at the age of thirty) both received the gift of interpretation 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 Yüsuf 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 awliyä´. 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 Sïrïn in order to ground his authority, and Shaykh Nabil’s story fluctu-

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ates depending on the interlocutory context. When I first heard the story of how al-Sayyida Ruqayya gave him the gift of interpretation, Shaykh Nabil, Hassan, and I were sitting in Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine, drinking tea and chatting. He recounted the story at a point when, I think, he had gained a basic trust that I 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.”15 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 SÏrÏn’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 Sïrïn’s baraka. As Madame Salwa, a frequent visitor to the shrine, put it, “Of course [Shaykh Nabil] is spiritual (rawhänï)! 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 Ruqayya 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 Nafïsa’s official 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 Sïrïn’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

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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 Ibn Sïrïn a visit. One time a middle-aged man entered the shrine without acknowledging Shaykh Nabil’s presence; he went straight to the maqsüra 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 Sïrïn had delivered to him by way of a dream-vision. There is no single typical visitor to Ibn Sïrïn’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 Egyptian broadcasting station. She wears bright red lipstick and a black coat, and has a thin black shawl 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 for most of her life, 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 Burhäniyya 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

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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.” I 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 Sïrïn’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 Sïrïn’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 `A ïn Shams University. She is divorced and lives in `Abbassiya, together with her mother and daughter. She says that she likes “spiritual matters (al-rawhäniyyät)” and enjoys interpreting her colleagues’ dreams. A friend first introduced her to Shaykh Nabil when she had seen a “difficult dream (ru´yä 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 (mawrüth).” 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 mawlids, 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

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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.”16 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” (Bukhärï 1979, no. 7042). This punishment is specified alongside the punishment 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). In a different sense, the notion that narrated dreams are powerful is also underlined in the Qur´an, where Yüsuf is warned by his father not to tell his dream to his brothers so as not to evoke their envy. Ibn Sïrïn’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-manäm . . . ).” 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. I became keenly aware

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of this when, soon after I 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 I had already finished telling it. When he realized that I had nothing to add, he offered platitudes in lieu of the eye-opening interpretation I was hoping for. I 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.17 There is nothing one cannot say as long as one is telling a dream, and frequently visitors to Ibn Sïrïn’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 halfheartedly, 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

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myself asked me whether she could tell me a dream that she was too embarrassed (maksüfa) 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 I was not an aspiring interpreter, and I 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 be a 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, hadïth nafsï, 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, different 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 (risäla mafhüma).” It is, so Shaykh Hanafi would say, “only one or two words.” A hadïth nafsï, by contrast, can be much longer and often leaves the dreamer confused. Someone likened the hadïth nafsï 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

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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 hadïth nafsï, 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 (niqäb). 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

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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 distributing 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 “do[es] 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 Ru´ä 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 I 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 niqäb. 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 Qur´anic verses, and his interpretations almost always correspond to those that are found in the texts ascribed to Ibn Sïrïn. 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 fü´, min `and Alläh).” 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-lï häl), and I 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.

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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 asbäb al-ru´yä, the reasons or circumstances of the dream-vision. This term echoes the principle of asbäb al-nuzül, 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`ä´) after him. Others come to him with problems such as childlessness or financial trouble. For Shaykh Nabil, dream interpretation, which provides an inner calmness (räha), is only one way of “serving people (khidmat al-näs).” 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-isläh bayn al-näs wa-l-khayr baynahum wa-l-tawgïh).” 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

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began joking about the problem that they had previously been so upset about. On a 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 (wasta). Step by step, he walked the young man through his options and tried to think of venues for help. I remember how impressed I 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 Sïrïn’s shrine, which, unlike other shrines, is not supported by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. It is ahlï, 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”),18 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 (less 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 Sïrïn 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 (shadä´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

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between the rich and the poor, a point where the good (al-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. In a 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. I 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 Sïrïn’s shrine differ from those someone would undergo while positioned on a Freudian couch—the new “holy site” for

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dreams, according to Ian 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 Sïrïn; 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´yä, the divinely inspired dream or waking vision. Shaykh Nabil does not always draw a clear line between ru´yä 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,

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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. Shaykh Qusi

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 mä´idat al-rahmän 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 mä´idat al-rahmän, literally a “table of the All-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. I 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-bätin. Tell us about the things we don’t see.” I 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 gath84

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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. I 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-bätin. Referring to hidden, inner meanings, al-bätin is opposed to al-zähir, 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-bätin, the invisible. His request rested on the assumption that al-bätin 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. Alläh, Alläh, Alläh, some exclaimed. Allähu 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 (basïra mukhlisa),” 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

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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 interlocutors, 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´yä might befall 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.1 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

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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 transformations 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 alKindï (d. ca. 866) and Hunayn ibn Ishäq (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.2 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.3 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,

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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 I 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 I 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.4 Jonas’s essay represents a particular understanding of sight that stretches from Plato to Descartes and into the twenty-first century. It is an understanding 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 I 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 world 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:

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“If 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.6 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 firäsa and ilhäm reach beyond the observable.7 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 (in)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 specifically 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

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is not to remain uninvolved, to regard the event disinterestedly. . . . It is to be taken” (1982, 261). Merleau-Ponty notes, “the relation between what I see and I 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 at 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.8 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 (sakrän),” 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

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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 ru´ya (which ends with the character tä´ marbüta) refers to the visual faculty, sight, and seeing; it is related to the eye’s gaze (basar). The word ru´yä (which ends with the letter alif) refers to a waking vision or dream, an inner vision (basïra); it relies on the heart’s eye (`ayn al-qalb) or the spirit (rüh). Both terms for vision, ru´ya and ru´yä, 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 (ra´ä/ ya´rä), no distinction is made between inner and outer vision, and the same holds true for the Egyptian colloquial equivalent (shäf/yashüf). While not always explicitly evoked, the Qur´an offers an implicit frame of reference for the distinction between spiritual and bodily sense experience. A number of Qur´anic verses begin with the phrase “Do you not see . . . ? (a-lam tara . . . ?)”9 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 hadïth qudsï, “and I wanted to be known. Therefore I created the world so they would know Me through it.”10 While the universe offers audible and olfactory signs as well, vision plays a preeminent role among the senses in the Qur´an.11 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 (dalä´il, äyät) such as the sun, flowers, or identical twins imply God just as a painting implies its painter.12 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 `A lï Gum`a, who is currently the state mufti of Egypt, in the Qur´anic context the verb can refer to any of four characteristics (2002,

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15–16): seeing with one’s senses (hässa); imagination and fantasy (khayäl, wahm); 13 thinking or reflection (tafkïr); and seeing with the mind (`aql). 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 “[unbelievers] 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.14 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 (basïra) but the power of his inner vision pierces his optical vision (basar) so that the optical vision for 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-Färäbï 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-`Arabï 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-Kindï, 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 (muräqaba) in which one believes without seeing, and enter into the stage of seeing (mushähada), which means

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that they see what they believe.15 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 (rüh). 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.16 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 Qur´anic verse that states, “God gathers up the souls (anfus) 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).17 While some interpreters insist on a difference between spirit (rüh) and self/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.18 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 possible. 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 (isrä´ wa mi`räj) of the Prophet Muhammad, who supposedly traveled on the back of the winged mule-like animal Buräq from Mecca

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to Jerusalem and then on through the heavens, where he met a number of prophets and came close to the inner presence of God.19 Although some scholars, among them Ibn Bäz, 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 off: One night I was sitting in my room, and a person appeared. I didn’t see his face. He was wearing a white gallabiyya [a flowing robe]. I saw myself leaving myself; I saw myself with my hair and my body, just like me. I turned and waved bye-bye to myself (`amalt li-nafsï “bye-bye”). Then the person took me to the balcony, and then I was on the street. I don’t know how I got from the balcony to the street. I got into my car with him and drove. I don’t know where I went, but I found myself 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. I 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 Sïdï [Shaykh Qusi] this whole story. I didn’t know at all what it was. Never in my life had I 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 Abü Hasan al-Shädhilï’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

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is wrong to speak of a separation of the spirit (infisäl al-rüh); one should rather refer to its extension (matt al-rüh): “People have a wrong notion. They say, for example, ‘The Prophet came to me in my sleep (gä lï al-rasül fi-l-manäm).’ That’s wrong. The Prophet doesn’t come to anyone. What they should say is, ‘I saw the Prophet (shuft al-rasül).’ 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 (yakhtaraq fï) 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 Hanafi 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 I was scolded for wanting to write about dream-visions without ever having seen one myself. I was (and remain) blind. Many suggested that I would understand spiritual matters much more quickly and without asking so many questions if I had experienced them directly. After all, as Sufis say, only those who have tasted, know (man dhäqa `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 istikhära. Pick anything you’re undecided about—say you can’t decide between going to Germany and going to al-Qusayr—pray istikhära, and go to sleep. Let’s assume you dream of al-Qusayr being in flames and

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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, I 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 from 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” (gihäz istiqbäl), her clairvoyance (shafäfiyya). 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.20 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. Before 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 istikhära prayer, dream-inducing “rules of conduct,” and the dhikr ritual.

Istikhära Literally meaning “seeking the best,” istikhära refers to a nonobligatory prayer through which guidance is sought when one is unable to decide between two permissible alternatives.21 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: O Allah, I seek Your help in finding out the best course of action (in this matter) by invoking Your knowledge; I ask You to empower me, and I beseech Your favor. You alone have the absolute power, while I 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 (I am embarking on) [here one mentions specifics] is good for 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 istikhära only once; others repeat the prayer three nights

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in a row and put together the answers. Still others pray istikhära eleven or thirteen times, and one shaykh told me that performing istikhära 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 istikhära for deciding 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 istikhära stories I heard, from both men and women, had to do with the choice of a marriage partner. “I didn’t know if he was right for me,” Nabila—a young woman in Mahalla, 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 istikhära about him. Everyone but I knew how the story would end, but all listened intently nevertheless. The night following the istikhära 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 istikhära with istishära, asking more experienced people. Many explained to me that istikhära 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.

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“I 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. I had not seen her in three years so, after her friend left, she filled me in on all that had happened—who her future husband was, how he proposed, and how she made up her mind. The man had approached Taqwa’s parents first, but instead of praying istikhära 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 reflected what she wanted subconsciously, it would be a hadïth nafsï and thereby meaningless. Egyptian psychologists frequently dismiss istikhära 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 will—is 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 istikhära prayer, there are numerous other things one can do in order to invite a dream-vision. As early as the eleventh century, al-Dïnawarï 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 (ädäb al-ru´yä),” “manners of the dreamer (adab al-rä´ï),” or “rules of conduct for the Muslim so that his dream-vision will be truthful (ädäb tata`allaq bi-l-muslim hattä tasduq ruy´ähu)” (e.g., `A lawish 2000; Farïd 2002; Ismä`ïl 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

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the right cheek. Even though the dream-vision is seen by the spirit (rüh) or the heart (qalb), bodily practices can thus facilitate its coming. Dream interpreters frequently instruct their “clients” on how to improve the quality of their dreams. Shaykh Hanafi suggests, for instance, that the ability to see the Prophet depends on one’s efforts in acts of devotion (al-igtihäd fi-l-`ibäda), 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 Hanafi 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 äyat al-kursï, the last three verses of Sürat al-Baqara, Sürat al-Ikhläs, al-Falaq, and al-Näs are recommended), and through which invocations one can ask God for dream-visions.22 Drawing on a hadith, Shaykh Hanafi suggests the following invocation: In the name of God, prayer and peace be upon the Prophet of God. O 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 (absär), what is concealed from the looks (anzär). 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 I am awake or asleep. O God, I ask you for a true, beneficial dream-vision, which is remembered and not forgotten. O God, show me in my sleep what I like. O 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 supposed 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.

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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 Mustafa 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 Mustafa considers effective 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 Alläh dhikran kathïran)” (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 Alläh before culminating in the syllable Hu (meaning “he”), which ultimately becomes an almost soundless 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.23 The name al-Muhaymin (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-Fattäh (the Opener) “brings light to the heart by lifting the [metaphysical] veil so that Truth can be seen.” The name al-`Alïm (the Knowing One) can expose the believer to kashf, a state of divine illumination, and the repeated recitation of the name al-Nür (the Light) in a dark house and with closed eyes brings about the seeing of a “strange light that fills [one’s] heart” (Jawäd n.d., 37, 64, 220). The repetition of formulas such as “I seek refuge with God (istaghfar Alläh)” 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

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you perform a hadra correctly and with the necessary sincerity (ikhläs). 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 hadra 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 performing dhikr often results in dream or waking visions. One of the shaykh’s followers recalled the following experience: “I saw in the dhikr, while I was doing dhikr in a Qur´an [recitation] session on a Friday, and while I was addressing His Majesty, Alläh, 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 resembles 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. I got to the part where we praise the Prophet. I put the book on my face. All of a sudden I didn’t see anything anymore. The page turned white. Then I saw fire, lots of fire, and devils in it. I 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

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the experience put her in. For months she was unable 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 (`ishqan wa shawqan li-lläh). When she spoke to her shaykh during that time, he reassured her that all of this was the vision’s impact (ta´thïr al-ru´yä). 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. A man comes to a 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 myself 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, istikhära, and various other bodily and recitational practices can evoke dream and waking visions. Yet, significantly, while the self can pre-

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pare itself for a dream-vision, it is displaced at the moment the vision is received. In a hadïth qudsï 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.”24 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, I 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 self-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 Muqaddimah Ibn Khaldün makes mention of a book of magic ascribed to a tenth-century Spanish scientist containing “dream words (halümiyya)” 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 Khaldün 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 Khaldün rejects the notion that dream-visions can be made. His argument is that the “dream words produce a preparedness (isti`däd) in the soul for the dream-vision,” but that “the power to prepare for a thing is not the same as power over the thing itself.” Rather, “The soul [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.25 Ibn Khaldün notes that of the various types of human beings who have “supernatural 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

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distinguish between states (ahwäl) that are bestowed upon believers without their participation and stations (maqämät) 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 I was visiting Shaykh Hanafi, a woman called him to inquire about the meaning of a specific dream that she had seen after performing the istikhära 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 Qur´anic sura] Yä Sïn two hundred times and not see anything. Someone else might not even read [the short sura] Allähu Ahad and see a dreamvision. It’s not controllable.” Seemingly echoing the views of Salafi reformers, Shaykh Hanafi then urged the woman to use her mind instead of praying istikhära. 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 Yüsuf 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

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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 Mä shä´ Alläh!26 It was about 2:00 a.m., and I was in a car with a number 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 for 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. Sharifa was clearly special. Mä shä´ Alläh, the shaykh had said; “others have tried for twenty years and don’t see anything.” Mä shä´ Alläh, 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 I 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, I 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 (bäbä), and because of the way the two interacted, for a long time I 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 Sharifa 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 (rüh) 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

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isn’t is dead.” He had given the right answer, and when Sharifa looked again, this third person had turned into Shaykh Qusi. Sharifa finished her dream account and added, “I didn’t get it at all. I know it was about who the wäsil (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 ownership 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 Sharifa? The frequent exclamations of Mä shä´ Alläh 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 (futühät) 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

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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.27 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-dunyä, 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, I 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 I 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 (shaqï ´awï). 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 Alläh al-Hay Alläh al-Hay (God the Living, God the Living); in the end it became only Alläh Alläh Alläh. (Mahmud closes his eyes while he is telling us the dream; he starts swinging back and forth, reciting Alläh Alläh Alläh. The dream is revisiting him.) The people told Mahmud that from now on he would not

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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 I met him. Mahmud’s dream-vision was a calling. He was transformed from a thief 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 fül 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 family 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 hadras; he had not prayed istikhära, 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 rabbinä), 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 (risäla), the implied epistemology seems to come closer to the somewhat antiquated German expression mir hat geträumt (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

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bestowing authority on himself. Admittedly, I 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 from a 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 from 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 (in)visible. 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 inflected. 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

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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 to the dreamer. The dreamvision is embedded in a double directionality. In Shaykh Hanafi’s words, a dream-vision is the believer speaking to God and God speaking to the believer. Ibn al-`Arabï 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 Khaldün’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.28 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, I 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.29 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,

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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 tell, 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 If a 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-GhazA ¯ li¯

It is 16 July 2004, the opening night of the mawlid of al-Sayyida Nafïsa, who was born 1,180 years ago. Located in Cairo’s City of the Dead, alSayyida Nafïsa’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 10:30 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 of heavy cloth. They have covered the floor 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-`A zïz. 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

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Figure 4. Shaykh Saläh al-Dïn al-Qüsï.

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 (innï 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-`A zïz, a pediatrician who performs as the group’s munshid on festive occasions.1 After

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praising God and the Prophet, he reads one of Shaykh Qusi’s poems, which honors al-Sayyida Nafïsa 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, for Dr. `Abd al-`A zïz 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 Alfiyyat 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: Alläh! Alläh! and Madad yä Sïdï madad! (Help, Sïdï, help!).2 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-higäb). 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 middleaged 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. I, 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.3 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.

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Guided by Shaykh Qusi’s poetry and his disciples’ narratives, I 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 reinscribe 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, tell, 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 of 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 from 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 Sufis, 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 (tarïqa), but that he teaches a path (tarïq) 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 (rüh). “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

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speaking to outside observers. I have also heard him explain to his followers that he does not want them going around and saying, “Sïdï said this,” or “Sïdï 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 referring to the Azharite stamp of approval in his books, a stamp verifying that nothing in them contradicts the “Islamic creed (al-`aqïda al-islämiyya).” 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” (2004b, 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 specifically 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 Sufism 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—süfï 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 yourself süfï or mutasawwif. 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, Sïdï!” 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 superficially. Besides the shaykh’s central role, the heightened attention to dreamvisions and waking visions within the group also aligns it with Sufi circles,

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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.)4 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 munshid’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.6 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 García Márquez might say, a style that shows reality itself to be at times so absurd that it appears almost magical.7 Although Mahfouz stated in another interview that “there may be a Sufi

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touch” to his dream narratives,8 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, Mahfouz’s dream-stories, while surreal, offer a window into childhood memories. Yet next to the corpus of internationally celebrated and translated Egyptian 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-khayäl, the Islamic tradition, and such other forms of authorship, I 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. I 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 (hägät gharïba)” 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 I 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 A4-size bound notebook with a photograph of the shaykh on its cover

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was handed to me, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. Besides the reverence 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 hijrï and mïlädï 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, followed 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 isnäd, 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 I was handed the book once again and told to sit down, look

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through the collection, and compose a list of the narratives that I wanted to have photocopied for me. Yet when `Umar checked on me roughly half an hour later, he decided that I 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 awliyä´, 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 well. 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 of, the collective construction of sainthood. Yet such a functionalist reading too quickly reduces dream-visions to ordinary dreams, and the imagination to “mere fantasy.” Instead, I 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 Michel 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 world? Is poetry not, at times, written from beyond the grave?

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Sudanese shaykh Muhammad al-Burhänï 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 spiritual-social relations. Shaykh Qusi, like Shaykh al-Burhänï, 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 alBurhänï 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-Bukhärï, and al-Sayyid al-Badawï, 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

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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 `A mr heard that `Ä´isha 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 ahl al-bayt. You don’t feel alone anymore. You never feel alone again. . . . I myself have experienced it many, many times. I have tasted it many times. I have seen events of past centuries. I see them and then I write about them . . . in my poetry. My poems are all 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 awliyä´, 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: I 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. (Qüsï 2004a, 268)

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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 ahl al-bayt and not to follow 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 (`Alï, Husayn), companions of the Prophet (`Umar, Biläl, Hamza), hadith transmitters (al-Bukhärï, al-Hasan al-Basrï), al-Khidr, and great Sufi saints (al-Sayyid al-Badawï). 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 to me . . .”). At other times the origin of the shaykh’s words is not specified (“And it was said to me . . .” or “There came to me someone who said . . .”). Even the initial impulse for writing the book Alfiyyat Muhammad did not stem from its author. In a poem, Shaykh Qusi describes receiving permission (presumably from 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 (2004a, 287). This ecstatic celebratory moment is the moment in which the book was born, the book from which Dr. `Abd al-`A zïz would later recite at al-Sayyida Nafïsa’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

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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” (Qüsï 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” (Qüsï 2004a, 33, 45).9 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-Zawäwï, a fifteenth-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-Zawäwï 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-Zawäwï’s Prophet-dreams portrays the Sufi as a “delusional,” “neurotically obsessive” “narcissist prone to flights of grandiose fantasy” (1996, 22, 23, xv). I assume 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-Zawäwï (a failed saint of the fifteenth century) and Shaykh Qusi (a successful spiritual guide

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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.10 Many of his disciples have witnessed the Prophet giving presents to Shaykh Qusi or praising him. At other times, al-Khidr or the awliyä´ 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 Sharifa, 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?” Sharifa nodded; the shaykh smiled. Mä shä´ Alläh, 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 male 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 säkhin),” 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

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Sharifa was recounting a vision she had seen. The shaykh interrupted his reading and turned to Sharifa with a smile: “Did I 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 followers 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

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hadith genre in their implied temporality. Linear time is a central premise in the hadith sciences, which rely on `ilm al-rijäl, 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 (isnäd). 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 of 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 hadiths. Though overflowing 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-`Arabï referred to those who see and talk to the Prophet in visions as the Prophet’s companions (sahäba) (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 isnäd), 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 (naqlan `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

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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 parallel to the way the Qur´anic 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 Qur´an states, “as for the poets, [only] those who are lost in grievous error would follow them” (26:224), and alleged hadiths define poetry as “Satan’s spittle (nafth alshaytän)” (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 (adghäth ahläm)!’—‘Nay, but he has invented [all] this!’—‘Nay, but he is [only] a poet!’ ” (21:5). In spite of the Qur´anic 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 Ibn al-`Arabï 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-Kindï and al-Ghazälï tended to disagree. The latter assumed that while mystics are able to receive divine inspiration, poets work only with their skills and knowledge. Ibn Khaldün’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

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already written. Indian poet Muhammad Iqbäl (d. 1938), who during his youth wrote exclusively in Urdu, in 1913 was inspired by a dream-apparition of the great Sufi poet Rümï (d. 1273) to use Farsi as well (Schimmel 1998, 117). Ibn Abï al-Dunyä’s ninth-century collection of dream-narratives includes a section on “poetry that has been transmitted in sleep and was then memorized” (Kinberg 1994, 133ff.). Al-Busïrï (d. 1295) had what might be called writer’s block while composing the famous Qasïdat 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-Busïrï’s shrine in Alexandria. Her account differs slightly from most secondary sources, which describe al-Busïrï 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-Färid (d. 1235), whose poetry has been called the “climax of classical Arabic mystical verse” (Schimmel 1982, 5). According to his grandson, Ibn al-Färid 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. In a manner that was strikingly reminiscent of what I had read about Ibn al-Färid, `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, I 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 (ilhäm) and prophecy (nubuwwa) are still accessible. Some define the difference between a messenger (rasül) and a prophet (nabï) by explaining that the former

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comes with a message, whereas the latter merely has the duty to refresh it.11 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 followers. 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. (Qüsï 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 ilhäm (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 I 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

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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 Sïdï’s heart (ulqiya fï qalb Sïdï) in a language other than Arabic (lugha ghayr al-`arabiyya). Then Sïdï 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-mahfüz) and then materialized in the form of the revealed Qur´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, Sïdï? 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, Sïdï’s poetry. The same night I was honored by a vision of something like a frame (barwäz) coming down from heaven. Sïdï 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

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the writing on the cloth of the Kaaba. And our lord [Shaykh Qusi] said to me, ‘I am clarifying for 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 (al-hadra al-Muhammadiyya) and witnessed a gathering of the awliyä´. 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 (al-maqäm al-sharïf)” 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

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al-nabï). He reenters the mosque. The shaykh asks him what he has seen, and he answers, “That it is revelation (wahy) and not divine inspiration (ilhäm). You cannot play with it.” A few years later, one Ramadan night, I 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.”12

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 of 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 (nubüwah)” (quoted in Lamoreaux 2002, 28). Similarly, many contemporary authors relate the dream-vision to both revelation and prophecy, but generally, in

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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 sharï`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 sharï`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 sharï`a. The term wahy, 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, I had the honor to attend the celebration that our shaykh, Shaykh Qusi, held . . . in a large tent at the mä´idat al-rahmän, which was located at the time on the grounds of the Cairo stadium. Dr. `Abd al-`A zïz was in the celebration, reciting some poems of the poetry book Al-`Atïq, written by our shaykh, Shaykh Qusi. . . . During the inshäd I saw, while awake, our lord al-Khidr. He was standing behind the rows at the beginning of the poem “Al-Shuhüd.” 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] (ashhad).” And before “The Seal,” which is part of the poem “Al-Shuhüd,” 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.”

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As in other vision narratives, al-Khidr here becomes visible and audible during (and through) the inshäd, 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 Qur´an13 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, I 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 difference between dream-vision (ru´yä) and revelation (wahy),” 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 felt distinctly unwelcome, and after our friend’s unsuccessful attempts to calm Shaykh `Abdullah’s worries, we left his house shortly after we had arrived. I 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

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between revelation (wahy), divine inspiration (ilhäm), prophecy (nubuwwa), and dream-vision (ru´yä), 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 wife `Ä´isha, the revelation began with dream-visions and, according to a hadith, “the dreams of the Prophets were revelation.”14 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 (qul). 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.”15 Many hadiths depict the revelation as taking place in a state of trance: “Zaid b. Thäbit said: I was at Muhammad’s side when the sakïna [immanence of God] came upon him. His thigh fell upon mine so heavily, that I feared it would break. When he recovered, he said to me: Write down, and I wrote down Süra iv.95” (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, Ibn al-Färid 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 hadïth qudsï or the shatahät, ecstatic utterances of 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 Rashïd Ridä’s The Muhammadan 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, reformist reason insists that prophetic insight is out of reach for contemporary Muslims, who should make use of their rational minds instead. Along with

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a turn toward a this-worldly ethics (and away from 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 imagination 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, I 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

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known because his disciples have seen it in their dreams. And the temptation 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 awliyä´. 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 struggles 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-khayäl, 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

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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 imagination 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, I 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 engagement, 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 cycle 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

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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.1 Freud disagreed and categorically brushed aside all attempts at uncovering a dream ethics. Dreams, for 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.2

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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 refer 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 from 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, 184f.). 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 performative 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 efficient 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.

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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.3 Abraham learns through a dream that he is to sacrifice his son, and although both father 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.4 Today, too, Egyptians of various social backgrounds adhere to the morally binding nature of dream-visions. In their eyes, the threefold categorization of dreams effectively 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.5 Scary, confusing, or incestuous dreams all fall into this category, as do so-called wet dreams (istihläm), which make necessary the washing of the entire body before prayer instead of just the regular ablution.6 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).

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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 (niqäb) because of a dream in which she was being chased and escaped into a house where a woman offered her a niqäb. 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 niqäb. 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 on a 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`län), and left. 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 twentyfive-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 Qur´anic 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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Figure 5. A tomb’s opening, or its “eye.”

begin reading specific verses in order to bring light to (biynawwar) the grave. I, meanwhile, would stand a few steps behind her and try to imagine my grandmother, rehearsing in my head the little that I knew about her: that she had been a school director in Port Said; that she had worked in Saudi Arabia and Qatar for a few years; that she used to write poetry. After Talkha came Tanta and my grandfather’s grave. It was a cold and cloudy day, and I admired my aunt’s insistence on equal treatment as she recited the exact same Qur´anic verses for her father as she had for her mother. I had never seen my grandfather’s burial place before. He had died about one year before I began my fieldwork, and he had done so at a particularly blessed time: on a Friday, on mawlid al-nabï (the Prophet’s birthday), and at communal prayer time. As is common in Egypt, spouses are buried with their respective families, not together. The tomb of my grandfather’s family, located in the main cemetery of Tanta, is surrounded by a wall and a gate. Only a few feet of the actual burial chamber are aboveground. This upper part has two openings through which the corpses are brought into the chamber, one for men and one for women. The openings are called `uyün, literally meaning “eyes.” While staring at these eyes and starting to feel chilly, it occurred to me that I had no idea what had made our visit to

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the cemetery that very day so urgent. When my aunt had called to invite me along, I had simply said yes, thinking of the trip as an occasion to pay my respects to my grandfather, spend time with my aunt, and take a brief vacation from my daily inquiries into dreams, dreamers, and dreaming. As so often happened, I was wrong. “Shuft bäbä fi-l-manäm wa talab minnï häga,” my aunt unexpectedly explained as we were driving away from the cemetery. She had seen her father in a dream, and he had requested something from her. She could not remember what that something was, but she was certain that she had to visit the cemetery as soon as possible. My aunt’s friends in the Nile Delta with whom we spent the night were offered the same explanation and nodded knowingly. It made sense to everyone that my grandfather had visited my aunt, and it made sense that we had driven up to Tanta in turn, stopping in Talkha along the way. Our trip was the response to a dream. Without necessarily being aware of all the intricacies of the classical traditions of dream interpretation, my aunt, a professor of linguistics at Cairo University, believes that certain dreams are “very important” in Islam. She owns the dream manuals of Ibn Sïrïn and al-Näbulusï, and she immediately approved of my research project, telling me that it was a good idea to write about a Muslim dream culture that is radically different from a Western Freudian one. My aunt is not alone in acknowledging the morally binding nature of certain dreams and, like her, many of my interlocutors contrasted their beliefs about dreams directly to Freud’s. Dialogically engaging the living, dreams of the dead have an evocative power in Egypt that is seemingly foreclosed by the Freudian model (or at least in terms of the ways this model is generally understood). While the “West” by no means univocally subscribes to a Freudian logic (and while there is no coherent Freudian logic to which one could subscribe in the first place), I next briefly recount Freud’s interpretation of one particular dream, which seems to presume, and prescribe, an irrevocable separation of the dead from the living. It is against, but also in dialogue with, Freudian interpretations of this kind that my aunt and other Egyptians define their dream beliefs and tell their dream-stories.

The Burning Child Revisited According to Philippe Ariès (1974), death was transformed in Europe about 1900 when a shift occurred from fixation on the loss of loved ones, expressed by hysterical mourning and an excessive cult of tombs and cemeteries, to the eventual effacement of death. In Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1899, the dead are not fully erased yet. Instead

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of leaving the world once and for all, they remain present, but only in the form of phantasms, as memories. The appearance of the dead in dreams thus becomes a perfect example of what all dreams are about: wish fulfillment. Besides dreamers dreaming of the living as dead (secretly wishing them to be so), a son might dream of his deceased father because he longs for him. The son might ponder over what his father would say if he were still alive, and because dreams cannot represent an if, the father will appear in the dream and talk to the son. Freud has no problem accounting for “the frequency with which dead people appear in dreams and act and associate with us as though they were still alive” (1965, 465). In Freud’s work, perhaps the best-known example that involves the return of a dead person is the dream of the burning child. This dream, of unknown origin, was related to Freud by one of his female patients, who in turn had learned about it in a lecture and then redreamed it. Freud finds the dream significant; it is a dream that should have “special claims upon our attention” (1965, 546). The dream opens the seventh and final chapter of Interpretation of Dreams, a chapter in which Freud sums up his major findings about the “psychology of the dream-processes.” The story goes as follows: A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen onto them. (547–48; italics in original)

For Freud, the explanation of this dream is simple. The bright glare of light must have shone through the open door into the sleeping man’s eyes, and instead of waking up immediately, the mourning father’s unconscious transformed his longing into a dream-appearance of the child, one that acts in the dream as if it were still alive. As long as he is protected from the harsh reality of waking life, the father is able to conjure up his child’s return. The return, however, remains incomplete. It is a return to life at a moment of danger. The return is fleeting in another way as well: the father

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will wake up. He will be reminded of the sad reality that his child is fully dead, and even more: that its dead body is on fire as if it were dying once more. The child cannot return, only its image can. The father knows this, or at least he will once he awakens. He does not belong to that “greater half of the human race”—those who, like children, fail to realize the true meaning of death and are ignorant “of the horrors of corruption, of freezing in the ice-cold grave, of the terrors of eternal nothingness” (1965, 287). For the father, who belongs to the other half of the human race, the dream has no real comfort to offer. What appeared to be a dialogue between father and child was really a monologue, a one-man play performed in the father’s unconscious. The curtain falls. The child is dead. The dream is over. End of story. I retell this Freudian interpretation not to uncover the limitations of Freud’s theory but to throw into relief what experiential and narrative possibilities are opened up in dream models that do not presume such a strict separation of the dead from the living. Even in Freud’s story, despite the overarching equation of death with “eternal nothingness,” the dead child seems uncannily alive, and it has been suggested that the story might originally have been not about the illusory appearance of a dream-image but about the real appearance of a ghost (Sträuli 2000). In Lacan’s reading, “the terrible vision of the dead son taking the father by the arm designates a beyond that makes itself heard in the dream” (1978, 59). In the next chapter I will address the question of how my interlocutors’ stories might open up spaces for thinking about this very beyond. Here I focus on the particular ethics that result from an understanding of the imagination according to which a dead son might indeed be able to hail his living father. To illustrate ramifications of dreams in a context where the “idea of being `dead’ has nothing much in common with ours apart from the word” (Freud 1965, 287), I next return briefly to Shaykh Qusi and his disciples. My aunt is not part of this particular community, and this community is only one of many religious groups in Egypt, yet the following conversation highlights broader intersections between death and dreams. It points to a space, the barzakh, in which the dead and the living can meet, and it shows that not only individuals but also entire communities can collectively engage with the realm of the dead.

Conversations in the Barzakh “Will you turn on your cell phone more often then?” Shaykh Qusi smiles in response. I shudder at the morbidity of the question. Granted, the shaykh’s health is slowly deteriorating, yet openly discussing his afterlife

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seems almost sacrilegious to me. Even if he is physically not doing well, shouldn’t we pretend he is, out of respect and politeness? Apparently not. Apparently, I too am caught up in the silencing, effacement, and tabooization of death described by Ariès. Apparently, the wall that has been built along the Autosträd in Cairo (and that seems to have no function but to shield those passing by from the large tan stone necropolis in which thousands of people live in and among tombs, the so-called City of the Dead) was built precisely for people like me. Apparently, death does not have to be so threatening, so absolute. The shaykh continues to smile while discussing with his disciples what the tombs will look like that the group has just begun building a little outside Cairo. While smoking a cigarette, he describes the tombs’ exact location before offering to his followers that they can include their names on a list if they want to be buried there. A long discussion ensues about possible spatial arrangements. Are women and men to be separated, or is there a way to reunite spouses and families inside the tombs? The debate about the burial site, yet to be completed but already collectively imagined, is joyful and humorous for the most part. Absent is the heaviness that usually descends upon rooms in which death is evoked in my familiar surroundings in Europe and North America (and probably in many other places as well). The shaykh’s disciples speak about the sign that is to be put up at the site; the hadras that will be held there; and, most strikingly for me, their own motionless bodies as they are being brought through the `uyün, the burial chamber’s eyes. Two or three followers tell the shaykh that they want to be buried particularly close to him. “And will you call from down there?” others ask. “Will you turn on your cell phone more often then?” Some disciples’ eyes turn teary as they prepare for their shaykh’s eventual departure from this world, but all know that his departure will not close the channels of communication between them. Most probably, cell phones will not provide the primary medium of communication after the shaykh’s passing. Already in this world, other communicatory channels play a more central role within the group. In the rare moments when the shaykh does turn on his cell phone, he has first learned through divinely inspired intuition that a particular person needs to talk to him. Although additional routes are provided by modern technologies, messages, images, questions, and guiding words are sent back and forth between members of the group primarily through dreams and visions. Sleep’s close kinship with death makes the dream a particularly fitting communicatory channel also between the living and the dead. Sleep is called the small death (al-mawt al-sughrä), and the spirit (rüh),

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which is believed to leave the body entirely only at the moment of death, is said to detach itself partly from the body during times of sleep so that it can roam freely. The shaykh, after his passing, will not be “down there,” he will be in the barzakh where the spirits of the living can communicate with him. A realm of in-betweenness, a time neither now nor then, and a place neither here nor there, the barzakh is the site where the living and the dead meet.

Dreams of the Dead In Egypt, dreams and death are related in a number of ways. On the most basic level, one might dream of one’s own or someone else’s death, which is usually interpreted as a positive sign, as announcing a happy future. An example of what dream interpreters call “interpretation by opposite (altafsïr bi-l-`aks),” death symbolizes life. According to Shaykh Nabil, death in a dream means “death of the past” and a new beginning. According to Ibn Sïrïn’s classical dream manual, depending on the dreamer’s state, death can mean that one’s debts will be paid, one’s sickness healed, or one’s prison sentence terminated.7 Other, less optimistic dreams symbolically prefigure an immanent death. The according symbols are well known and abundant in books on dream interpretation. A female playwright in her thirties told me that her father once dreamed that one of the big lion statues by the Nile Bridge fell. The playwright’s grandfather interpreted the dream to mean that the president would die, and one week later President Gamal `Abd al-Nasser passed away. My grandfather’s death was announced to a relative in the Nile Delta through a dream in which she saw herself in my grandfather’s apartment in Cairo, eating grilled fish with her brother and my aunt, but without my grandfather. As grilled fish symbolizes death, the dreamer knew that my grandfather was going to die and tried to get to Cairo the following day, but failed to arrive in time.8 My grandfather himself, earlier in his life, had foreseen his wife’s death. After seeing himself perform the call to prayer while facing a wall, he learned through consulting a dream manual that conducting the call to prayer in a closed place means that someone close to him would die.9 His wife, my grandmother, was sick at the time, but he kept his premonition to himself so as not to upset anyone. Similarly, the loss of teeth in a dream is said to indicate with precision who is about to die: back teeth symbolize older relatives, front teeth younger ones; the right side are men, the left side women. While these and many other examples point to a vast world of dream symbols, they tell us little about the interplay between the realms of the living and the dead. This interplay and the

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dialogical possibilities it enables are more vividly expressed in dreams in which the dead come back to visit the living. In fact, the dead visit quite frequently. According to Egyptian sociologist Sayyid `Uways, who conducted a study of Egyptians’ attitudes about death in the 1960s, more than 50 percent of the students he interviewed said they had been visited by dead relatives in their dreams (1977, 238). During my fieldwork I heard numerous stories that featured the dead as central characters, such as that of a working-class woman in Cairo, who told me, referring to her next-door neighbor, “She used to come to me as my friend, and after she died, she came to me in a dream.” In some of these stories, it seemed irrelevant who was dead and who was alive. Someone’s state of death then appeared merely as a postscript (sometimes literally so, in the case of written dreams) or was indicated by inserting the phrase “may God have mercy on him/her (Alläh yarhamu/hä)” into the dream-telling. In other cases, the dead person’s location in the barzakh is a central element of the dream narrative, so that what the person says or does is significant precisely because she is dead. Dreams of the dead can have very real effects. A thirty-one-year-old artist, whose father died in a car accident when she was young, told me she is convinced that one can even die from seeing the dead in a dream. Generally, however, the dead appear in dreams because they want the living to do something for them. Yasmin, a middle-aged, married woman whom I met in al-Qusayr, had always been very close to her grandfather, particularly since her parents were divorced. Once, Yasmin told me, her dead grandfather came to her in a dream, and he seemed hungry. This meant that his spirit was hungry, and that she needed to distribute food among the poor on the Prophet’s birthday. It did not matter where she was to hand out the food, but it needed to be done in the name of the grandfather’s spirit (`alä rühu). Even dead animals can address the living with their needs. A friend in Cairo told me that her dead dog appeared to her one night. As the dog seemed to be suffering, the woman asked her husband the next day where he had buried the dog, only to find that bulldozers had destroyed the burial place on the day before her dream. As she explained to me, it was the dog’s spirit (rüh) that had come to her. Frequently in visitational dreams, those appearing to the dreamer not only make requests, but also give—and what the dreamer receives, besides the visit, is knowledge. The dream then becomes a site of exchanges. In the textual tradition, according to Smith and Haddad (2002, 183), “the dead are reported in a variety of ways to be cognizant of the living and through the media of dreams and other appearances are often felt to be

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able to communicate their desires and directives to those still alive on this earth.” Suggesting a similar pairing of desires and directives, Shaykh Nabil explained to me that after death we enter a world in which we know but cannot act. While alive, by contrast, we act but do not know. The dead, who see everything, come to guide us while in turn asking us to visit them, give alms in their name, or pray for them. The fact that the dead are dead makes them both trustworthy and a unique source of knowledge. A hadith confirms that the words of the dead in dreams are always true, because the dead reside in the realm of truth (där al-haqq). Accordingly, a classical dream genre in Islamic biographical dictionaries consists of accounts of the dead returning to inform the living of what they experienced after death.10 An entire section in al-Ghazälï’s Revival of the Religious Sciences deals with “The States of the Dead which have been known through Unveiling (mukäshafa) in Dreams” (1995, 149– 56). According to other sources, two friends would sometimes agree that whichever was the first to die would appear to the other to tell her what happened. Because the resulting dreams often contain advice about what deeds are best, they have been read as a form of “practical ethics and moral counsel.”11 Dreams of the dead are informative and compelling. They instruct the dreamer how to act in order to follow (or not to follow) their dead interlocutor’s example. The dead want the living to learn from their mistakes and sometimes inform them directly of what awaits them after death. Rasha, a middle-aged woman from one of Egypt’s oases, told Shaykh Nabil and me the following dream: I had this dream three days ago. It was about my two dead uncles, may God have mercy on them. I was in a house, my mother’s house, as if I wasn’t married yet. My mother and siblings were there. They were in the main room, and there was a hallway leading to the bathroom and the kitchen. They were performing their ablutions (wudü´). My cousin was standing there with a towel for the ones who had finished. Then I saw my (paternal) uncle come closer, the younger one. He was putting down his sleeves; he had just performed his ablutions. I knew that he was dead. I was extremely afraid, and I kept saying, “There is no god but God.” Then my other uncle came, the older one, and I kept saying, “There is no god but God.” I went up to him and wanted to kiss his hands, but he said “enough” and lifted his hands.

Rasha not only frames the dream as being about the dead uncles, but she also already knows within the dream that her interlocutors are dead, which provokes her to pronounce the Muslim proclamation of faith, often

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uttered in the face of danger. Shaykh Nabil explained that fear within a dream is a positive sign, and he interpreted the dream to mean that Rasha has a place in paradise. Yet her entry into paradise, while prefigured by the dream, will not come to her effortlessly. Shaykh Nabil continued, “The purity (wudü´) here is your purity. It means you should keep up your purity. I can see that you are good. Your heart is white, but the devil is never far. So keep up your purity. ‘But for those who of their Sustainer’s Presence stand in fear, two gardens [of paradise] are readied.’ ” And with this Qur´anic phrase (55:46) Shaykh Nabil concluded his interpretation. He assured Rasha of her place in paradise, but the (interpreted) dream also contained a moral imperative. Like many dream-visions, at least in Shaykh Nabil’s eyes, it was both a glad tiding (bushrä) and a form of guidance (tawgïh). It is important to note that according to Shaykh Nabil’s understanding, he does not draw on intuitive insight or his own moral convictions, but merely translates the ethical guidance that is put forth by the dead interlocutors. Among the many dead interlocutors who guide the living are also the awliyä´. The awliyä´ are not simply abstract figures known from texts, taped sermons, and mosque lessons; they come to be known directly through nightly encounters as well. Like dreams of the dead more generally, encounters with the saints engage believers in unobservable yet ethically compelling relationships.

The AwliyA¯ ´: Cycles of Visitation Precisely one year after I had first met Madame Salwa, I called her from New York. Sitting at my kitchen table and staring out into Brooklyn’s gray skies, I picked up the phone and dialed the familiar number. Madame Salwa answered almost immediately. “I’m with al-Sayyida Nafïsa. I’m distributing (anä `and al-sitt al-Sayyida Nafïsa; anä bawazz`a)” she screamed into her cell phone, trying to override the background noise. The excited tone of her voice instantaneously transported me back to Cairo. With the phone to my ear, I could almost smell the rose water emanating from al-Sayyida Nafïsa’s shrine; taste the sweet, homemade milk pudding that Madame Salwa was distributing in little white plastic containers; perceive the green fluorescent light on the rugs in the mosque; and touch the little bundles of flowers stuck into the maqsüra, the metal enclosure surrounding the shrine. None of these smells, tastes, sounds, textures, and colors would have become so ingrained in my memory had I not met Madame Salwa one year prior to the phone call at a different shrine. Our paths had

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converged seemingly randomly: Madame Salwa had been directed to the shrine by a dream; I, by my research. Soon thereafter we began making our visiting rounds together, and I learned that Madame Salwa never “goes to the shrine of” so-and-so but always simply “is with” so-and-so. Even the preposition with does not do full justice to the Egyptian `and (`ind in classical Arabic). (The German bei or the French chez might get closer to the Arabic preposition than the English with.) As is the case with spiritually advanced Sufis, who are said to be `and al-nabï (with the Prophet), the preposition connotes spiritual closeness, a joined participation in the same sphere, immediate contact. The saints are just as present for Madame Salwa as are her friends and family. And they demand just as much of her attention and visiting energy. Madame Salwa is in her late forties and married but childless. She and her husband live in a one-bedroom apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Cairo. Although her life has been difficult, Madame Salwa thanks God for her fate. She believes that God kept her childless so that she could get closer to ahl al-bayt, the Prophet’s saintly descendants. She is one of thousands of Egyptians of the most diverse backgrounds who frequent Cairo’s saint shrines; al-Sayyida Nafïsa is one of hundreds of awliyä´ who visit them and in turn are visited by them. Al-Sayyida Nafïsa (d. 824), the great-granddaughter of the Prophet’s grandson al-Imäm Hasan, was born in Mecca, but the Prophet announced to her in a dream-vision that she was to die in Egypt, so she did. People speak of al-Sayyida Nafïsa’s exceptional piety and her religious zeal: she undertook the pilgrimage thirty times, stayed up at night to pray, fasted most of the time (she ate only every third day), and performed a number of miracles. When she fell sick one year during Ramadan and was advised by her doctor to stop fasting, she refused and scolded the doctor for wanting to prolong the time she had to wait before finally being reunited with God, the eternal object of her longing. Today, al-Sayyida Nafïsa lies buried in a grave that she supposedly dug with her own hands. She is said to have descended into the grave and to have recited the entire Qur´an 114 times in it before she died. As another story goes, her husband intended to bury her in Mecca, but the Egyptians wanted the tomb to be built in their midst. They went to their ruler to ask for help and offered money to her husband, but all in vain. Saddened, they prepared for the saint’s departure. The next morning, the husband had changed his mind. The Prophet had instructed him in a dream to bury his wife in Cairo. Besides al-Sayyida Nafïsa, al-Sayyida Zaynab, al-Ja`far al-Sädiq, al-Sayyida `Ä´isha, and the head of al-Imäm al-Husayn are also buried

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Figure 6. Women visiting al-Sayyida Zaynab.

in Cairo, as are innumerable less-known descendants of the Prophet. According to an employee at the Higher Council of Sufi Affairs, there are more than nine hundred saint shrines in Cairo alone. They dot the alleys of the City of the Dead and of what is commonly known as Islamic Cairo. Some of these tombs fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Religious Affairs; others are privately financed and maintained by people like Shaykh Nabil. While she visits many of the saints, Madame Salwa feels particularly close to al-Sayyida Nafïsa. Once, she told me, she was feeling upset (matdäyi´a) and decided to pay al-Sayyida Nafïsa a visit. Together with a friend, who did not care much about the awliyä´ but went along to accompany her, she arrived at the mosque in the late afternoon and found it closed. Disappointed, she decided that she would at least read the Fätiha, the opening sura of the Qur´an, in front of the closed door. As she was doing so, two men appeared and unlocked the mosque’s gate for her without saying a word. Upon her entry into the mosque, a number of doors were opened in complete silence, and at last Madame Salwa found herself facing the shrine. Embracing it, she felt that al-Sayyida Nafïsa was taking her into her arms (hudn), and she stood there and cried and cried. After a while, she

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became scared and walked out. Again, two men opened door after door in silence, without asking for money or anything else. Madame Salwa joined her friend, who walked her home speechlessly. Sometimes she refers to such events as miracles (karämät). On another occasion, a guard unlocked a shrine’s door for her, then locked her in for a while, and afterward told her that she had just had a “session (galsa).” Madame Salwa’s relationships with the saints are intense. The saints welcome her—in a motherly way (embracing her) or in an almost therapeutic way (holding a session). They care about her, but they also place demands on her. As Smith and Haddad note, the “interaction of believers and walïs [awliyä´] is a complex process involving expectation of reward, fear of reprisal for neglect and a highly structured set of particular responsibilities” (2002, 190). The relationship between saint and believer, crucially, is never one-sided. It is a cycle of exchanges.

Visits and Countervisits In the Sayyida Nafïsa mosque, one finds a steady stream of visitors at almost any time of day. A visit to the shrine minimally implies physically entering the shrine and reciting the Fätiha, but it can also involve extended periods of sitting in the shrine, conducting entire social outings and picnics in the mosque, reciting additional Qur´anic verses, speaking to the saint, asking her to intervene with God, or presenting offerings (nadhr), most often in the form of money that is given in response to a vow that has been fulfilled. Among those visiting al-Sayyida Nafïsa are people from the countryside, workers, housewives, doctors, engineers, and ministers who all come for the saint’s baraka. The saint, who is also called nafïsat al-`ilm (precious gem of knowledge), is furthermore well known for her quest for religious knowledge, which was so profound that even al-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï is said to have admired her for it. For this reason many students come to the shrine, especially during exam periods. They mingle with the occasional couple who are about to be engaged or married and who have come to seek the saint’s blessings. Also present in the mosque are the sick who have come in hopes of being healed, and the poor who have come to ask for relief. Next to or even among the students, the soon-to-be-wed, the sick, the poor, and those longing for the saint’s baraka, there are those who are here because the saint invited them to come. Their visit was preceded by a visitational dream. Visits between saints and believers are mutual, and sometimes they also overlap. Not only do dream-visions result in visits to saints’ shrines, but being at a saint’s shrine can also result in dream-visions. Supposedly

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in the past Egyptians used to sleep or nap in shrines more frequently so as to be visited by the saints. Today, sleeping in mosques is often forbidden, but sometimes sleep involuntarily overcomes the visitors, who are then reproached by onlookers with the question, “Did you come here to sleep or to pray?” I heard a number of stories of how saints became visible to visitors who were fully asleep or half-asleep in or around the shrines. Yet while the saints’ spirits are seemingly more present in their shrines, at the same time they are not spatially confined, as ultimately they are located in the barzakh. Just as believers visit the saints, sometimes taking microbuses, trains, or taxis and sometimes walking for miles, the saints, without having to take any form of transportation, visit the believers in their homes. It is considered a special blessing to be called upon by a saint, and stories of visitational dreams are often introduced with the phrase “I was honored by the vision of . . . (tasharraft bi-ru´yat . . . ).” Usually, when you see a saint in a dream, Madame Salwa explained to me, you know which one it is even though they rarely announce themselves and say, “I’m so-and-so.” Rather, “you feel it inside of you.” Others described “feeling in their heart” whom they were seeing in their dreams. For times when you lack this inner certainty, Madame Salwa noted, the dream might be an invitation to visit all of the saints. The blessing of being visited by a saint comes with an obligation. The visit has to be reciprocated as soon as possible, usually by the dreamer herself but sometimes also by someone close to her. The urgency that evokes the countervisit to the shrine is most clearly expressed when visitors at shrines state that they have received an order (gä lï al-amr). Sometimes dream-orders direct dreamers to unfamiliar places. In spite of growing tensions between Christians and Muslims in Egypt, dreams can incite Muslims to visit Christian saints, and it supposedly used to also be more common for Christians to visit Muslim saints.12 Such crossvisitations seem to have become rare but still occur on occasion. Once I met a middle-aged, presumably working-class Muslim woman in the Catholic church of Saint Theresa in Cairo. She wore a khimär, a kind of veil that covers the head and torso, and she told me that she was visiting Saint Theresa because she had seen the saint in a dream. Saint Theresa (d. 1897), also called Theresa of the Child Jesus or the Little Flower, was a French Carmelite nun and saint who is known in Egypt for her miracles. The entrance area to her church in Shubra is covered with hundreds of plaques in Arabic, French, Chinese, German, Hebrew, Spanish, and other languages, all thanking the saint for her miraculous interventions. As the Muslim woman explained to me, two nights earlier, while half asleep, she

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had seen a lot of light and in it an angelic shape. She figured that she was being visited by either the Virgin Mary or Saint Theresa, and she decided to visit the latter, as she would not have known where to visit the Virgin.13 She added that she came as quickly as possible so as not to upset the saint and that she hoped Saint Theresa would visit her again and help her solve her children’s problems. Not only spatial, but also denominational crossings can be triggered by visitational dreams. Conversion stories told by Copts often involve the Virgin’s or a Christian saint’s visit to a Muslim, an incident of miraculous healing, the Muslim’s conversion to Christianity, and a subsequent life in danger or escape abroad to evade repercussions. Two Christian friends, both in their twenties, together recounted to me the story of a Muslim woman who had leukemia. One night the Virgin appeared to her, and the woman asked, “What are you doing here?” The Virgin responded, “I have come to you because you are suffering and because I love you.” The Virgin took her cross and stirred a glass of water with it, and the woman drank. The Virgin then touched the woman’s body at the places where it was sick, took out the “sicknesses (amräd),” and put them on a table, one by one, until they were all lying there. As the Virgin was about to depart, the woman asked her for baraka, and the Virgin left her cross. The next day the doctor came who was going to perform the operation, but all the tumors had miraculously vanished. The body had no marks, only little crosses at the places where the tumors had previously been. As my friends concluded contentedly, the woman subsequently converted and has been praising Christ ever since. Even when nighttime encounters do not lead to conversions or other radical life changes, they can trigger a range of actions, some with fleeting and some with more long-lasting effects. Encounters with saints can be compelling—if for no other reason than that the saints represent a model of the good, pious life that one is to emulate. A twenty-one-year-old female college student explained to me that if you dream of one of the Prophet’s wives, “it’s a sign that you should try harder. Even if you’re religious, it means you should become more religious. Get closer (ta´rabi). Try to become like her exactly.” In addition to representing a model of pious behavior, the saints can also place explicit demands on the dreamers.

Of Beans and Buildings “You put them in the bags,” Madame Salwa said to me. And so I did, scooping spoonfuls of fül, cooked beans, from two big pots into little plastic bags. Three days earlier Madame Salwa had told me that, God willing, she

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and her mother would distribute fül at al-Sayyida Zaynab’s shrine and that I should come along. Knowing of Madame Salwa’s intimate ties to the saints, I agreed immediately. As was often the case, the visit was a longer endeavor than I had anticipated, and I quickly gave up on any other plans I had made for that day. After meeting in the early morning at Madame Salwa’s apartment, after buying bread in her neighborhood and getting into an argument with the bread seller, after the hourlong bus ride to her mother’s house and the obligatory first round of tea, we started cooking the beans, which had previously been soaked until they started sprouting. Now that I was filling the little plastic bags and sprinkling salt and cumin onto the beans, I felt the afternoon heat creep in. Two more hours would go by before our arrival at al-Sayyida Zaynab’s mosque. Once there, I would try to keep up with Madame Salwa’s pace as she forced her way through the crowd into the shrine. Inside the shrine she would start handing out the bags and bread, seemingly at random, to women sitting on the floor. While I was filling the bags with fül, Madame Salwa mentioned to me that her mother had seen “this fül” in a dream and “that’s why we are doing this.” Later on her mother also told me that she had seen “this fül” in her sleep (fi-l-manäm). She had dreamed close to the morning, maybe two hours before getting up, that she entered the kitchen and found the sink filled with fül. It was not a symbolic fül whose meaning could be looked up in a dictionary of dream symbols. Rather, it was “this fül,” as both women emphasized. Madame Salwa’s mother had dreamed a dream that requested its own enactment. According to Madame Salwa, her mother is not exceptionally religious. She “only” prays, and she has performed the pilgrimage but, unlike her daughter, does not usually visit the saints. She could not remember the last time she had been to al-Sayyida Zaynab’s mosque; in fact, she had not really left the house much in the past year or two. Yet the dream ordered the two women to make the rather tiresome trip to the mosque. It was not especially important that they ended up distributing the beans at this particular place; another shrine would have done just as well, according to Madame Salwa. The central imperative was that of distribution (tawzï`). Possibly some of the women who were receiving the gift had themselves been summoned to the shrine by way of a dream. As Abu-Zahra (1997) notes in her ethnography of that particular mosque, al-Sayyida Zaynab occasionally appears in dreams to urge women to visit her, eat the food distributed at her shrine, and keep the vows made to her. The food we were handing out was the material effect of one dream, and it might have been prefigured in other dreams.

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In most cases, dream-inspired actions are almost as fleeting as the dreams themselves. Other times dream-visitations can have more longlasting, material effects, among them architectural ones. It is not uncommon for saints to announce by way of a dream-vision where they want to be (re)buried, so a number of shrines in Egypt were built as a result of dream-visions. Madame Salwa told me the following story about a saint named Gharïb: Sïdï Gharïb (may God be content with him) was from Morocco. His name was `Abdullah, and he was called Gharïb [stranger] because he was fighting in the city of Suez and defending it. They say that, after he lost his leg in battle, he took the leg in his hand and used it as a sword. He was [buried] somewhere—we don’t know where exactly— until he came in a dream (gä fi-l-manäm) to Shaykh Häfiz, who was a good man (ragul tayyib), and asked him to take him out from where he was buried and put him in a shrine. They tried to find his [original] grave, but they couldn’t find it, and he came again to [Shaykh Häfiz]. He went back and dug deeper and found the body wrapped in white cloth with the leg next to it. The body was still intact, and a pure beautiful smell was emanating from it—awliyä´ don’t get eaten by worms.14 He took the body out and washed it and put it into a shrine as he had been told. Sïdï Gharïb is now buried in the mosque of the city of Suez, and they called the mosque Gharïb.

Appearing twice by way of a dream-vision, Shaykh Gharïb insisted on being buried in a particular place, and he finally was. The dreamer, in this case a “good man” but often a famous person, saint, or government official, is bound to execute the saint’s request. Abü Hasan al-Shädhilï’s shrine is said to have been erected after he appeared to President Gamal `Abd al-Nasser in a vision and requested that his tomb be built at its current location. A religious student, who used to pray regularly in al-Sayyid Badawï’s mosque, after his death appeared to President Anwar al-Sadat and asked to be buried inside his favorite mosque. Shaykh Mutawallï alSha`räwï, a highly popular Egyptian preacher who died in 1998, is said to have appeared to President Mubarak, who supposedly initiated the building of the shaykh’s shrine in the Delta region of al-Sharqiyya.15 I heard these stories from Egyptians who frequent saint shrines, and as the three Egyptian presidents are generally not thought of as very religious figures, I found surprising the claim that they would have let themselves be moved by dreams. Although it seems likely that the three presidents would have denied these claims if asked about them, I evoke them here, alongside my own surprise, to emphasize the extent to which certain dreams are taken

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to be morally binding in the eyes of my interlocutors. Regardless of her piety, the dreamer has to follow the dream because instructions delivered in dreams are “very clear,” as a young woman explained to me. So clear that even the Egyptian presidents would not have dared to ignore them. There are other shrines that do not host any body but are nevertheless the effects of dream-visions. In Cairo, so-called vision-sites (mashähid ru´yä; sing. mashhad ru´yä) include the shrines of al-Sayyida Ruqayya, Muhammad al-Anwar, Räbi`a al-`Adawiyya, and supposedly also al-Sayyida Sukaina. Sometimes it is disputed whether a particular shrine contains the saint’s body or is “only” a mashhad ru´yä, which some consider a second-class shrine. Al-Sayyida Zaynab has a number of shrines in Egypt, many of which do not lay claim to the presence of her body, and al-Imäm al-Husayn has supposedly appeared to dozens of people in villages to ask for a local shrine to be built. I was told that a striking number of Sufi shaykhs who passed away in Luxor announced by way of dreams that they wanted their shrines to be built in Aswan. How might one begin to understand the phenomenon of the mashhad ru´yä, the vision-site? Egyptian historian Su`äd Muhammad Mähir (1971, 102f.) links the proliferation of such shrines to medieval “times of hardship and war,” when believers sought refuge with the Prophet’s family and needed more places where they could receive baraka and speak supplications. Those critical of saint visitations often note that most saint shrines were built during the Fatimid era, between the early tenth and the late twelfth century, as the Fatimids were a Shi`ite dynasty that encouraged saint worship.16 Regardless of when the shrines were actually built, such accounts overlook that according to those who visit the shrines, it is neither the people’s longing nor Shi`ite politics that caused the vision-shrines to be built (and, as Su`äd Mähir vaguely implies, dreams accordingly to be seen). Rather, it is the saints who tire of drifting around the barzakh and want to be anchored in a physical site.

Subversive Visitations? Entire buildings have been born in dreams, but saint tombs, saint visitations, and the dreams that give rise to them are heavily contested. Visits to saint shrines are denounced already in early hadith literatures, and while generally the visitation of graves is recommended in all four Sunni schools of law, Ibn Taymiyya even opposed pilgrimages to the Prophet’s grave in Medina. A similar position was later taken up by Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Wahhäb, who considered visits to saint shrines an unacceptable form of bid`a, an unwarranted innovation that is best avoided. In Egypt in the

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late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers renounced visits to saint shrines as backward and polytheistic (Jong and Radtke 1999), and intellectuals, concerned with the nation’s progress and social order, called for a complete abolition of saint’s day festivals (Schielke 2006). Though aware of such criticisms, which continue into (or are revived in) the twenty-first century, Madame Salwa and many other Egyptians nevertheless visit the saints. Yet even Madame Salwa does not follow every invitation that she receives by way of dreams. “I don’t like to carry out (anaffiz) everything I see,” she once explained to me. After all, one cannot always be certain if it was really a saint who appeared, and not the devil or a jinn. Seeing a woman dressed in white walking down the street is a typical example of a vision caused by a jinn, yet it could also be a waking vision featuring one of the female awliyä´, specifically those who died as virgins, such as al-Sayyida Sukaina or al-Sayyida Ruqayya, as they are often seen in white bridal dresses. Whereas for Madame Salwa it is merely a matter of differentiating between jinn-inspired dreams and truthful dream-visions, others question whether a saint would ever appear to a believer to invite her to visit. In a paradigmatic debate on the legitimacy of saint visitations, published in a 1986 issue of the weekly al-Nür, an Egyptian religious scholar and academic is asked about the claims of women who say that the awliyä´ urged them in dreams to visit their shrines (Johansen 1996, 136–46). He answers that this might well be the case, and he complements his response with a story. While he was teaching at a college in Mecca, he wanted to visit the Prophet on a monthly basis but could not afford it. Then one night he heard a voice in a dream that said, “Come at our expense (ta`äl `alä hisäbinä).” After waking up, he realized that the Prophet had spoken to him, and within the next few days he was asked to prepare a Qur´an program on television that paid ten times his teaching salary. At that moment, he says, he realized the “truth of his dream-invitation.” In a later issue, the weekly published a response by Dr. `Umar, a tafsïr teacher at the Assiut branch of al-Azhar, who is introduced as an “axial figure in the Islamic Movement.” Dr. `Umar insists that women are never invited in dreams. Rather, he says, “this comes from the Devil, who takes on the form of a walï [saint], claiming that he is inviting her to visit him. A real walï would never bring a woman out of her home to visit him, not being related to her. This is a superstition (khuräfa) like the superstition of people who say that the Prophet is alive in his tomb” (146). Visitational dreams (and to an even greater extent the countervisits they provoke) run against the grain of reformist Islam and, in Dr. `Umar’s

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view, are troublesome because they incite women to leave their homes. Precisely for this reason, some observers have interpreted the intimate relationship between saints and women as a (probably unconscious) form of resistance. Michael Gilsenan (2000) points out that the cycles of exchanges between saint and believer to a large extent lie outside the state’s control and prescribed rules of conduct. He speaks of the “disordering power” of dreams that invite women to visit the shrines of saints, whose powers are already “resistant to worldly authorities.” Marcia Hermansen similarly argues that Muslim women can be empowered through dreaming because, “while women’s dreams of saints commanding them to attend shrines are disparaged by scripturalist male religious authorities, such dreams allow the women to penetrate more public social spaces” (2001, 84). Hermansen’s point that many women do visit saint shrines because they were invited in dreams is well taken. At the same time, dreams and visions do not fit easily into a public/private paradigm. Even without going to visit a saint, a woman who in her dreams has extensive conversations with alSayyida Nafïsa or al-Sayyida Zaynab participates in religious realms that she might not partake in on a visible level. More important is that reading these cycles of visitation as a form of resistance or as subversive fails to take into account the dream-vision’s own compelling force. This does not mean that dreams cannot have subversive effects, or that skeptics do not dismiss them precisely because of these effects. Ultimately, however, within the dream ethics adhered to by Madame Salwa and many others, the imperative to visit the saints does not spring from personal desires but comes from an Elsewhere. Instead of a language of resistance, I have therefore chosen a language of ethics to speak about dream-visitations in Egypt. Although this language, too, offers only one out of multiple interpretive frameworks, it can take us beyond subject-centered paradigms and thereby get us closer to what my interlocutors would contend their dream-visions are all about. My point here is not simply to aim for an experience-near account; I believe that a better understanding of the relationality in my interlocutors’ dreamstories complicates models that conceptualize ethics as based on reason, commonsense, natural law, or the autonomous subject. Ethics here are inherently dialogical. They are not just about acting but also about being acted upon. The cycle of visitations that binds believers to saints can therefore be understood neither from a viewpoint that roots intentionality in the individual subject nor from one that is confined to the visible social world. In responding to a visitational dream, the dreamer does not answer (or refuses to answer) to the state, to worldly authorities, to the law, or to

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scripturalist male religious authorities; rather, she responds to an ethical imperative that is put forth by the dream-vision itself. Last, I turn to a no less contested and compelling kind of visit: that of the Prophet. In the case of visions of the Prophet, the provoked countervisit can lead the dreamer to the pilgrimage to Mecca, which constitutes one of the five pillars of Islam and is certainly less problematic in the eyes of orthodox and reformist scholars than visits to saint shrines. Nevertheless, the question of who might be visited by the Prophet is also highly disputed.

“The Prophet Came to Me” I boarded the metro in downtown Cairo and headed south, bypassing the working-class neighborhood in which al-Sayyida Zaynab lies buried, Coptic Cairo, and an upper-class neighborhood that is popular among U.S. expatriates. Eventually the metro came to a halt in Helwan, its final destination on the city’s outskirts. Mona, a friend of mine and a graduate student at al-Azhar, was waiting at the station. We walked through a busy market, made our way down some narrow alleys, passed by a small park, and finally arrived at the house in which Mona’s great-aunt lives. Most of Mona’s relatives are at home in an oasis in Egypt’s southwestern desert, but al-Hagga Nura, who was about eighty years old when I met her, was born in Cairo and had lived in Helwan for a long time, together with her sister. Both used to work in a cloth factory and nowadays try to get by on their small pension. Most striking for me about al-Hagga Nura’s dark apartment was that all the food items, pots, pans, plates, mugs, cups, and silverware were wrapped in plastic bags, crowding the kitchen counter and the living room’s only table. Mona, who had previously lived with her great-aunt, had tried to convince her in vain that the ubiquitous plastic bags were only attracting more roaches. Al-Hagga Nura has gotten used to where she lives. And in spite of her financial worries, the roaches, and the damp darkness, she considers her home to be blessed. It is where the Prophet came to visit her. “I was sick and lying on the bed. And my father (may God have mercy on him) and my uncle (may God have mercy on him) were sitting on the sofa. . . . And then what? Then alaihi assaläm, peace be upon him, came in. I said, ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I am the Prophet of God.’ I said, ‘Welcome, Prophet of God. I want to go on the pilgrimage.’ And he said, ‘I came to you; that’s it, you have already performed the pilgrimage.’ ” Al-Hagga Nura showed me the sofa that her father and uncle were sitting on when the Prophet visited, and she pointed to the door through which the Prophet

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entered. She spoke the dream-vision into my digital recorder and, as she was dissatisfied with the sound quality when listening to the recording about an hour later, she recorded it once more, using the exact same words. It seemed as if she had told the dream many times already. Mona looked content as we were listening to the dream. Earlier, she had rolled her eyes and giggled when al-Hagga Nura told me that she had recognized me right away because she had dreamed of me the previous night. At that point, Mona had leaned over to me and whispered that this was all “empty talk,” kaläm färigh. While Mona had dismissed most of her great-aunt’s dream-stories, she did not doubt that the Prophet had truly come to this apartment. Like us now, he had visited al-Hagga Nura and, in visiting her, he had given her a double gift: he blessed her with his presence, and he absolved her of the duty to undertake the tiring trip to Saudi Arabia in order to perform the pilgrimage. As he assured her, she did not need to come to him anymore, because he had come to her instead. His visit preempted hers. To be on the safe side, al-Hagga Nura did not simply rely on this assurance, but the year following the dream-vision she traveled to Mecca and Medina to reciprocate the Prophet’s visit. Knowingly or not, she thereby also complied with the scholarly consensus that regardless of what the Prophet says in a dream, a dream can never reverse any central religious tenets. A visionary pilgrimage cannot substitute for the “real” pilgrimage, but the Prophet’s visit can lead to or even require the pilgrimage.

“Whoever Sees Me in His Sleep . . .” From the time the Prophet began receiving divine revelations until his death, his contemporaries were able to turn to him with questions. The answers they received, as well as their observations about his habits and opinions, were meticulously recorded in hadiths. Since the Prophet’s death, the body of hadiths is generally taken to be the only way to retrieve the Prophet’s sunna, his normative way of life that believers are to emulate. In Daniel Brown’s words, the sunna “for most Muslims [is] a symbol of the link with the Prophetic era, the representation of the Prophet in the here and now, a concrete embodiment of the need that Muslims have felt in every generation for continuity with an ideal past” (1996, 2). However, when Brown states that without the hadith, the Qur´an would be the only form of revealed Truth (57), he overlooks a shortcut to the Prophet that is not bounded by linear time or by textual genres. Even illiterate believers without access to hadith works can be in touch with the Prophet. While dream-encounters with the Prophet exceed what is recorded in the

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hadith, dreamers often draw on hadiths to legitimize their Prophet-visions. The Prophet himself affirmed the possibility of his dream-visitations by saying, “whoever sees me in his sleep has truly seen me, because the devil cannot take my form.” Another version of the hadith holds, “whoever sees me in his sleep will see me,” and still another, “whoever has seen me in his sleep will not go to hell.”17 The first version, which is the one most often cited in Egypt, affirms the essential truthfulness of Prophet-visions by establishing the identity of signifier and signified. The Prophet in the dream-vision is not a symbol; he is the Prophet. In light of this, what is special about seeing the Prophet is that the dreamer can (almost) be certain that the dream appearance is neither a reflection of her desire, nor the devil producing a dream-image in her mind. A certain space for doubt remains, however, because opinions diverge on what seeing the Prophet actually entails. If the Prophet’s skin appears as wheat-colored in a dream-vision, while textual sources describe it as white, is it still truly the Prophet who came for a visit?18 Ibn Sïrïn argued that it is only really the Prophet if what one sees in the dream corresponds precisely to the textual accounts. He would therefore make dreamers describe the Prophet’s appearance, and if their description did not correspond to the Prophet’s true image, then the dream would fall in the category of confused, meaningless dreams. By contrast, Ibn al-`Arabï believed that if one sees the Prophet in his real image, it is truth (haqq), and if one sees him differently, it is allegory (mithäl), but for him both kinds of visions qualified as true encounters. Others held that the Prophet is always seen depending on the dreamer’s personal circumstances, and al-Näbulusï added, “this is the great benefit of seeing him (peace be upon him) that through it the dreamer’s condition (häl) is known” (1999, 417). While there is some disagreement concerning what seeing the Prophet actually entails, visionary encounters with the Prophet figure widely in accounts of Sufi lives. After having gone to Mansura to fight against the Crusaders, Abü al-Hasan al-Shädhilï (d. 1285) was reassured by a vision of the Prophet, who promised him victory. Through a dream, the Prophet announced to the Sufi poet Ibn al-Färid (d. 1235) that they were directly related, and he clothed Shah Walï Alläh of Delhi (d. 1762) in a mantle. In Algeria, Ahmad al-Tijänï (d. 1815) saw the Prophet in a waking vision and was taught by him the litanies for his new order. In the Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad (d. 1885) supposedly learned through a mystical encounter with the Prophet that he was the mahdï. Shaykh Mansür Ushurma (d. 1794), who is associated with the Naqshabandiyya in the northern Caucasus, had a

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dream of the Prophet that convinced him to undertake a jihäd against the Russian offensive in his homeland (Sirriyeh 1999, 5, 17, 36, 38). Some Sufis had singular and unique transformative encounters with the Prophet; for others the connection was ongoing—like Sayyid Abü al-`Abbäs al-Mursï (d. 1287), who exclaimed, “If I am veiled from the vision of the Prophet for one second, I do not consider myself a Muslim!” (Hoffman-Ladd 1992, 621). Sufis in Egypt told me that after having reached a particularly high spiritual state and after having gone through a mystical disclosure (kashf), one sees the Prophet continually.

“It’s Me—Muhammad” Some describe seeing the Prophet as a spiritual privilege, something that only those far advanced along the Sufi path might experience, not the “ignorant masses.” A dervish recounted to me the story of Khadïja, the Prophet’s wife, who was asked how many times she saw the Prophet. One time, she answered. She once dropped a needle in front of her door, and as she was bending down to pick it up, she saw a ray of light reaching from earth to heaven, and this is the only time she truly saw Muhammad. If even the Prophet’s wife saw the Prophet only once, how then can contemporary Egyptians claim to be seeing him continually? I heard a number of shaykhs and religious scholars ridicule laypersons who say they have seen the Prophet. At a large gathering, Shaykh Qusi told the crowd, “People will tell you they saw the Prophet and he said, ‘It’s me—Muhammad,’ and he patted their knee or something. How come? Does someone else appear in a dream and say ‘Hello, I’m Ahmad’? How come these people who are not even in a pure state and who don’t pray see the Prophet, while I’ve never seen him?” A number of the shaykh’s disciples giggled. The thought of Shaykh Qusi never having seen the Prophet was absurd to them. Yet the shaykh’s point was that while people speak of seeing the Prophet all the time, many of them might be making it up, or they might be mistaking dreams conjured up by their wishes for truthful visions. While for Shaykh Qusi whether someone might be able to see the Prophet depends on her spiritual advancement, a number of Wahhabi and Salafi scholars reject the idea of Prophet-visions entirely, insisting that the Prophet exists in a different state from the one he was in during his lifetime. According to their view, not only is direct access to God’s revelation no longer possible, but the Prophet himself is truly dead and cannot be communicated with anymore. Of course, critical voices of this sort do not prevent the telling of dream-

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stories in which the Prophet figures prominently. Hierarchies between the exceptional few and the supposedly ignorant masses collapse within, and through, laypersons’ dream-stories. I was repeatedly struck by the frequency with which believers claim to have been visited, advised, warned, taught, consoled, or blessed by the Prophet.19 A Qur´anic healer euphorically reported to me, “Thousands have seen the Prophet. Thousands of men and thousands of women. Thousands have come here and told me that they have seen the Prophet.” Whereas Shaykh Qusi often explained that the Prophet is a form of light and that he does not speak Arabic in dreams but instead communicates by way of a “dream-language, something like a universal language,” nonetheless, to others, encounters with the Prophet are very concrete, almost tangible. The Prophet’s visit can be very special and simultaneously very casual. Like al-Hagga Nura, many described to me how the Prophet entered their homes and talked to them in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, and a woman in her early twenties told me (in English) that she saw the Prophet and found him “very cute.”20 While dream-encounters with the Prophet can be recounted as almost offhand, informal visits, they tend to leave a strong impact on the dreamer, and they can have visible, material effects.

Some Effects of Prophet-Dreams An Egyptian politician, who dreamed of the Prophet for the first time when he was about thirty years old, told me that “God opens doors” for those who have seen the Prophet. A woman who remembered hearing the Prophet’s voice in a dream when she was fifteen years old was assured, as a result of her dream, that she would go on the pilgrimage. An Indonesian woman who grew up in Saudi Arabia and now lives in Egypt once witnessed in a dream someone pulling the Prophet’s beard, which outraged her. A few days later, someone close to her died in an accident, and in the process his hand became severed from his body—according to her, the same hand that had pulled the Prophet’s beard in her dream. Besides alluding to the future, the Prophet can give advice in dreams; he can be an almost fatherly interlocutor or a guide (dalïl, murshid). Many members of Shaykh Qusi’s community describe continually being in touch with the Prophet and relying on his help in small and major life decisions. As one middle-aged woman put it, “I’ve seen [the Prophet] many times. He tells me things, and I ask him for advice (bastashïru).” A young, recently engaged woman who was studying medicine in Cairo recounted the “most important dream of her life,” a dream she had seen four months earlier—a dream in which the Prophet, his daughter, and his son-in-law visited her:

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I was in a very bad psychological state. I was very upset. My mother passed away when I was young. I used to see her in my dreams, and I hadn’t seen her in a while. It was important for me to see her to make sure that she was okay. I was upset and crying a lot. I prayed and went to sleep. I saw in my dream a man and a woman. The woman said to me that she’s Fätima, the Prophet’s daughter, and the man is our lord `A lï. In the background I saw a person come down, and I knew it was the Prophet. I woke up, extremely happy. I was very happy to see `A lï and Fätima because they’re such a good couple. I had always wanted to see `A lï. I like him a lot. He is also a philosopher. And I had always wanted to see the Prophet. Of course, I couldn’t recognize him; I only saw light, but I knew it was he.

The woman said that when she woke up from the dream, she was overjoyed. Instead of her mother, she had seen the Prophet, his daughter, and his son-in-law, and she gained comfort and happiness from the dream. The encounter was a gift that transformed her emotional state. Besides offering advice and comfort, Prophet-visions can also be evocative; they can reshape the dreamer. One of Madame Salwa’s dreams exemplifies how the Prophet can interfere in believers’ lives, how he can direct them: I dreamed that [the Prophet] was in a store, and I was passing by. There were also other girls, and I tried to attract his attention, so I went taktak-tak [making a sound with her shoes] while I was walking by. I stopped at the end of the street and looked back, and he, the Prophet, was right behind me. He smiled at me and said, “What are you doing? Why did you stop? You know where to go. Your house is up there.” So I walked up the hill to the house that he had pointed to. It was a white house with green rugs. Inside were angels and Abü Hurayra [one of the Prophet’s companions]. He explained to me how to read hadiths correctly.

Madame Salwa interpreted the dream for herself. “It meant,” she explained, “that the Prophet knew that my inside (guwwa) was religious even though I didn’t look like it. The angels and the [Prophet’s] companions are my home.” Although Madame Salwa was exposed to weekly Qur´anic recitations from an early age onward, she said that she “didn’t look religious” at the time the dream-vision came to her and that she used to wear short skirts (very short ones, it seems, from the gesture that went with the story). Yet the Prophet already knew that she would come to follow the right path and sent her in the right direction. When I met Madame Salwa years later, her friends, mother, and sister praised her as being very spiritual (rawhäniyya), and much of her energy went into reading the Qur´an,

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praying, exploring religious Web sites, and visiting the Prophet’s saintly descendants. At that point Madame Salwa was far advanced along the path to which the Prophet had pointed her many years earlier.

Conclusion The three kinds of dreams discussed in this chapter form a certain hierarchy. Dream-visits from the dead are the most frequent and ordinary. The dead can be very present in believers’ lives, despite reformist attempts to draw sharp lines between the dead and the living. Among the dead, the awliyä´ are particularly honored guests, and the visible component of performing a ziyära—that is, of visiting the saint—is matched by the invisible component of the saint visiting the believer, who in turn is compelled to reciprocate the visit. Similarly, visits by the most beloved of all guests, the Prophet, transform and move the dreamer. Drawing on examples from each of these subgenres, I have told you of my aunt being summoned by her father through a dream, the communication between a shaykh and his disciples that will outlive death, a woman being informed by her deceased relatives that she has a place in paradise, Madame Salwa’s visits to the saint shrines, shrines being built because they were requested in dreams, and al-Hagga Nura’s encounter with the Prophet. Just as the “spiritual mechanism” described by Marcel Mauss “obliges us to make a return gift for a gift received” (1967, 5), visitational dreams in all these cases bring with them obligations. Each dream-visitation is simultaneously an invitation. Whereas in ancient Greek dream narratives, visitational dreams were written in highly stylized forms—with a tall man habitually entering the room through the keyhole, planting himself at the head of the dreamer’s bed, and informing her she is asleep (Dodds 1951; Kilborne 1981)—in contemporary Egypt visitational dreams are told rather casually, as if one were speaking of a friend having stopped by the other day. The Prophet in such stories is “very cute,” and the Prophet’s daughter and his son-in-law are a “good couple.” Nevertheless, what one is told (or shown) by these imaginary Others is taken very seriously. Orders are executed; warnings are taken into account; glad tidings are rejoiced at. Because of a dream, someone might visit a cemetery or build a shrine, distribute money or food, go on the pilgrimage, or improve her religious practice. Not only have entire empires and schools of thought been founded, wars been fought, and books been written because of dreams, but also the little things people do in their everyday lives are at times translations of what they saw in their sleep.

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The question of whether a moral imperative reaches into dreams accordingly needs to be expanded into the question of whether moral dispositions, feelings, and obligations might not at times also come through dreams. As the examples above show, dream-visions can indeed (be interpreted to) put forth a moral imperative; they can be binding and obliging. Dreams can do things and make the dreamer do things. Not confined to the darkness of the night, they evoke and call forth responses visible in bright daylight. They not only transform the dreamer’s inner state but also affect how people interact with others in their daily lives. Dream-visions in Egypt are therefore never “first and foremost manifestations of an unbridled and ruthless egoism” (Freud 1963, 152); they are interlocutory events, and they instruct the dreamer on how to act. This is what makes the dream-vision ethical. Readers might object that the dream effects that I have described—visits to cemeteries or shrines, the distribution of food, attempts to live more pious lives—ultimately reduce the ethical to the material. Yet while my interlocutors would agree that piety is linked to alleviating the suffering of others, another, broader meaning of the ethical is at work in their stories as well. My interlocutors distribute food not simply out of a sense of duty or in response to concrete moral imperatives, they do so also because it is, on a more fundamental level, part of their way of being in the world. The lines between ethics and morality are rarely clearly defined, and maybe they cannot be, but if we take morality to refer to historically specific social codes that regulate behavior through dictating what is right and what wrong, and if we take ethics to refer to the general human condition of being a “political animal”—of always being acted upon, acting toward, and acting with others—then my interlocutors’ dream ethics cannot be reduced to questions of morality. They are, rather, political—at least if we follow Hannah Arendt’s understanding that politics is ultimately about the recognition of “others from whom one cannot escape and with whom one must share the world” (quoted in Kwon 2008, 156). My interlocutors are reminded by their dreams of their connectedness to the living and the dead. Thus while, as Judith Butler notes, “the ‘you’ is ignored by individualist doctrines which are too preoccupied with praising the rights of the I,” visitational dreams alert their dreamers to the fact that “I exist in an important sense for you, and by virtue of you” (2005, 32). The you, as I have described, here encompasses not only living humans but also the dead, saints, the Prophet, and God. In this sense dream-visions are ethical and political because they decenter the self-contained self. Another possible objection (coming from the opposite direction) might

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be that a focus on ethical dimensions ignores the fact that almost all dreams in this chapter were dreamed at a time when many, if not all, Egyptians, during their waking hours were preoccupied with the war in Iraq and the precarious economic situation in Egypt. Again, one might be tempted to propose a causal link: because times are difficult, people escape into their dream-worlds. Maybe Madame Salwa’s mother dreamed of beans simply because she went to bed hungry or heard on the radio that many people are starving. Maybe Egyptians dream of the awliyä´ or the Prophet because they feel isolated and alienated. While the royal road into the unconscious and other well-trampled paths are readily available, I have tried to take a different route in thinking through my interlocutors’ stories and their implications, paying attention to the ethical imaginations through which the dreamers themselves render their dreams meaningful. This does not mean that no debates occur in Egypt over what “really” underlies such dream-stories. Muslim positions on dreams diverge widely, and today Muslim dream experts are also joined by Western-trained psychologists, who frequently contend that people see in their dreams simply what and whom they want to see. Although the Freudian notion of hallucinatory wish fulfillment does not sit easily with the kinds of ethics I have described here, Muslim dream interpreters (as well as skeptical psychoanalysts) frequently move between the two dream epistemes.21 As we will see next, the outcomes of this interplay are never easily predictable, to say the least.

6. The Royal Road into the Unknown Freud is satanic talk. An engineer at Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine

When we study psychology here in Egypt, Freud is presented as the starting point. But really there’s a lot of cultural heritage that we don’t know about. We’re separated from this heritage. It’s as if we had amnesia and were only slowly trying to remember what is out there. A self-proclaimed Islamist psychiatrist in Cairo

Al-Hagg Sayyid, an Egyptian in his eighties, once met a group of German doctors. He tried to explain to them the importance of dreams. “That’s empty talk,” they said and told him that they don’t believe in dreams. He responded, “You’re the children of Freud and of Nietzsche! But we as Muslims have to believe in dreams. If you don’t believe in dreams, you’re not a Muslim.” While telling me about his encounter, al-Hagg Sayyid smiled triumphantly, but I was left with a sense of unease. Is it really either Freud and Nietzsche or Islam? What about Muslim dreamers who are also informed by Western philosophy? What about Muslim psychoanalysts? Do not dreams themselves draw attention to the in-between, to what lies beyond the either/or? What then was I to make of statements such as alHagg Sayyid’s, which redraw sharp lines between this and that? Over the course of my fieldwork, I came to think of Egypt’s discursive dream landscapes as continuously moving between fixity and openness, between either/or and in-between spaces. Those insisting that it is either Freud or Islam frequently maintained that, according to the former, dreams are a form of hallucinatory wish fulfillment and index the dreamer’s past, whereas within an Islamic episteme, certain dreams offer guidance for the future and provide a royal road into al-ghayb, the metaphysical world of the Unknown.1 Such insistence on bounded entities and incommensurability is understandable within the current political climate but ignores the ways in which religious and psychological paradigms continuously reshape, if not constitute, one another in places such as Egypt. According to a leading psychiatrist, 60 percent of the Egyptians who seek the help of 173

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a general practitioner or psychiatrist have previously consulted a healer (Okasha 2004, 271). Conversely, even the most “traditional” Muslim dream interpreters are familiar with at least some aspects of Freud’s theory. Next to the many new editions of classical dream manuals, one finds in Cairo’s street stalls Arabic paperback booklets with titles such as “Dreams and Nightmares: Scientific and Religious Interpretation,” “Dreams between Science and Belief,” or “The Foundations and Principles of Dream Interpretation between Freud and the Muslim Scholars.”2 In everyday dream talk a popular psychology frequently mingles with religious concepts, and skeptical psychoanalysts at times unwillingly get trapped into using religious terminologies. Far from the Freudian legacy simply having displaced religious models (or the Islamic Revival having undermined the truth claims of the secular sciences), the epistemes associated with the Islamic tradition and with Western psychology continuously inform and inflect each other. Islam and Freud are always already in dialogue in Egypt today. This chapter, then, is not about an encounter between “tradition” and “modernity,” but about a particularly constituted modernity in which different traditions converge. It looks at intersections, collisions, and overlaps between two different, but co-present, royal roads—one leading into the unconscious, the other into al-ghayb. Before turning to what lies between Freudian psychology and Muslim dream interpretation, I briefly describe the history of psychology and psychoanalysis in Egypt, beginning with the importation of Freud in the 1940s and ending with the fragmentation of the field in the present. The remainder of the chapter explores how two seemingly incompatible interpretive systems come to interact in concrete contexts. Ultimately, as we will see, the meaning of dreams is always up for debate in Egypt, since a prophetic or divine sign in the eyes of some can be a hallucinatory projection according to others. Tellingly, these debates are not necessarily predictable along the lines of who is inside and who outside of which tradition, or who considers herself more closely aligned to one or the other. Tracing such shifting grounds, this chapter—like this book as a whole—aims to unsettle the regime of the either/or.

Importing Freud “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague,” Freud allegedly commented to C. G. Jung as their ship was drawing into New York City’s harbor in 1909. Twenty years later, a young Egyptian man named Mustafa Ziwer was to find himself on board a ship as well.3 Instead of the Atlantic, he was crossing the Mediterranean en route to France and, far from Freud’s

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cynicism, he was probably filled with an enthusiastic optimism. Like many of his contemporaries, he was spurred by the desire to bring Egypt “up to date,” and when he returned to Egypt more than ten years later, he brought with him Freud’s “plague,” which by that time had become a “positive science, an exportable technology, and an index of progress” (Nandy 1995, 138). As in other parts of the world, the importation of psychoanalysis into Egypt occurred in the wake of colonialism and as part of a broader modernizing project. After Napoleon’s brief excursion into Egypt toward the end of the eighteenth century, during which he was accompanied not only by fifty thousand soldiers but also by 151 Parisian scientists and artists, the sense seems to have prevailed in Egypt that it needed to “catch up” with Europe’s scientific and technological developments. In the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman-appointed ruler Muhammad Ali modernized Egypt’s education system, army, and administration and sent student missions to Europe with the intent of creating a new elite familiar with Western thought and technology. These efforts continued during the British colonization of Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they continue in different forms today. The student missions, the founding of secular universities, and the importation of psychoanalysis can all be understood within the context of a hegemonic evolutionary model that created a need for Egypt to modernize along European lines. Ziwer was one of the many students involved in this broad modernizing effort. Born in 1907, he was among the first philosophy students at what is now Cairo University. After graduating in 1929 he traveled to France, where he studied philosophy and logic at the Sorbonne before turning to medicine (with a focus on neurology), chemistry, biology, and applied psychology. In 1939 he obtained his doctorate in medicine from the University of Lyon. Back in Egypt, he taught at universities in Cairo and Alexandria, and he later returned to Paris to complete his psychoanalysis with two different analysts. In 1950, Taha Husayn, then minister of education, appointed Ziwer to establish and supervise the first Egyptian psychology department at the newly founded `A ïn Shams University in Cairo. In this new department, Ziwer taught general psychology, psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, psychiatry, applied psychology, and child psychology. Prior to Ziwer’s efforts, exposure to Western psychology had been only sporadic in Egypt. In the early twentieth century, lectures addressed the psychology of women, and the psychology of mental disorders was explained to law students (Soueif 2001, 217). Since the 1930s some intellectuals had shown an interest in psychoanalysis. Yet it was Ziwer who

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popularized Freud and established psychology as a discipline.4 As one psychologist in Cairo told me, Ziwer was a “pioneer, just like Freud.” His former students praise Ziwer for having brought something entirely new to Egypt and occasionally refer to him as the “first Egyptian, if not first Arab, psychoanalyst” (Taha 1988, 7). Other psychologists emphasized that “psychology is imported but it’s different from importing cars,” or that far from simply copying Freud, Ziwer in the process expanded and modified the field of psychoanalysis. As one former student describes it, “in [Ziwer’s] lectures we were listening to a source of knowledge and not just to a transmitter of knowledge” (Kafäfï 1991, 6). The individuals who sought out Ziwer’s help as an analyst generally belonged to the elite. Ziwer remarked that French was the preferred language in analysis at the time, whereas colloquial Egyptian Arabic was used only occasionally for affective expression and the reenactment of early childhood experiences (1945). While psychoanalysis as a practice seems to have been available only to a select few, Freudian terms traveled into numerous Egyptian households by way of radio waves. In the 1950s Ziwer gave radio talks on psychological issues that he considered relevant to society as a whole, among them gambling and depression.5 During this time, “Freud was like the Qur´an” on Cairo’s campuses, as an elderly Muslim psychologist (now skeptical of his initial enthusiasm) told me regretfully. Leaving behind a largely Freudian legacy, Mustafa Ziwer passed away in 1990. Nevine Ziwer, the pioneer’s daughter, who today is one of very few practicing Egyptian psychoanalysts, remembers her father as a calm, sweet, charismatic man who “was totally Freudian (kän Früyidï khälis).” Among Ziwer’s many renowned students are Yusuf Mourad, Moustafa Safouan, Ahmed Faraq, Sami `Ali, Ahmed Fa´iq, Husayn `Abd al-Qädir, `Uthäm Nagätï, and Ahmed Okasha.6 Some of them followed their teacher’s example and traveled to France; like him, many later returned to teach in Egypt. Yusuf Mourad, a Lebanese Christian, studied experimental psychology under Piéron and Delacroix, published a book on Fakhr al-Dïn alRäzï and physiognomy in 1939, and together with Ziwer, edited the journal `Ilm al-Nafs (Egyptian Journal of Psychology), which came out quarterly between 1945 and 1953. The journal’s temporary end was announced in an issue with the dramatic tagline “Another voice falls silent (sawt akhar yaskut),” but publication of the journal was resumed in 1987. Husayn `Abd al-Qädir specialized in the field of psychodrama and taught psychoanalysis and pathology from 1977 to 1990. Ahmed Okasha, after turning his back on psychoanalysis, came to subscribe to neurobiological interpretations of behavior, and at the time of my fieldwork he was the head of the

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World Psychiatric Association. Sami `A li, who graduated from Alexandria University in 1946, was sent to Paris by Taha Husayn, where he received his PhD in 1959. After teaching in Egypt for five years, he returned to France and became the first director of the Psychosomatic Institute in Paris. Among his publications are L’espace imaginaire (1974) and Le haschisch en Égypte: Essai d’anthropologie psychanalytique (1971), and he also translated Freud’s Three Essays on the History of Sexuality into Arabic.

Traumdeutung in Arabic Like Sami `A li, some of Ziwer’s students contributed to the domestication of psychology by making Freud’s works available in Arabic. Moustafa Safouan, who was to translate Freud’s masterwork Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams), graduated from Färüq University in Alexandria in 1943 as one of Ziwer’s first three psychology students and left for France two years later to undergo analysis. In 1949 he met Jacques Lacan, became one of his first students, and worked closely with him until Lacan’s death in 1981. On the back cover of Safouan’s book Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (2004), a blurb by Slavok Žižek praises the author as “the most exquisite old wine—pure mature taste of the uncompromising theory [, an author who stands out] among the crowd of soda-pop Lacanian commentators and critics.” Besides his closeness to Lacan and his work as a translator (he also translated Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes into Arabic), Safouan is probably best known for his controversial plea for a wider use of colloquial Arabic, directed against the supremacy of classical Arabic, which Safouan rejected as a class-related form of oppression.7 His translation of Freud’s Traumdeutung took Safouan three years to complete and first came out in 1958—fifty-nine years after the German original and forty-five after its English translation. Mustafa Ziwer, Safouan’s teacher and mentor, celebrated the translation as a “great cultural event (hadath thaqäfï `azïm)” (Ziwar 1994, 14). In his preface to the translated work Ziwer commented on a universal interest in dreams, referring to the story of Yüsuf (Joseph) in the Qur´an and the Bible; ancient Indian, Chinese, and Arab civilizations; Ibn Sïrïn; Aristotle; Hippocrates; and medieval and modern philosophers. He concluded that dreams have preoccupied humans “since the oldest known times,” and yet, he wrote, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that a “decisive solution” was found when Freud “discovered the dream’s nature” (7f.). In Freud’s own preface to the English edition of Traumdeutung, he referred to the book as the “most valuable of all the discoveries it ha[d] been [his] good fortune to make,” adding that “insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime” (Freud 1965;

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Figure 7. Freud’s Traumdeutung in Arabic translation.

xxxii). Ziwer countered Freud’s contention, asserting that a discovery like this in fact comes not once in a lifetime but once in the course of several centuries (1994, 8). While Ziwer took Freud’s revolutionary discovery to have universal validity, he described its content as culturally specific. An Arabic translation did not come out sooner, Ziwer explained, because Freud’s text “brims over with (yazkhar min) Western culture, both modern and ancient GreekLatin, which made a correct transfer into Arabic impossible without the translator actually taking on (iktasaba) this culture” (Ziwar 1994, 14). Adding that the translator needed to be well versed in German, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and ancient and European literatures, Ziwer praised his student Safouan for fulfilling all these prerequisites. For Ziwer, Freud’s

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findings, while culturally embedded, would solve humankind’s puzzlement over the true nature of the dream. Summarizing Freud’s theory for the readers, he related the dream to the “imagination (khayäl) of poets and other artists” and described the dream’s nature as “hallucinatory (halwasa)” (8f.). Similarly, Safouan explains in his introduction that dreams occur on a “fantastic basis (`alä asäs mauhüm)” (Safwän 1994, 16). The dream is rooted in the dreamer’s imagination, yet al-khayäl here is not a prophetic faculty but more akin to fantasy. The true origin of all dreams, so Freud revealed and his Egyptian disciples confirm, is the dreamer’s unconscious. Like Ziwer, Safouan seems convinced that Freud’s findings apply to all dreams in all places and times. Addressing his “Arab readers,” he expresses the hope that “this book will have the same effect among us as it did in the West” (26). The goal of his translation, then, is to let Arabic-speaking audiences participate in the Freudian revolution. Ibn Sïrïn does not have an alternative, equally valid model to offer; his legacy is superseded and displaced by Freud’s discovery. Now that Freud’s “decisive solution” has been found, according to Safouan, Ibn Sïrïn is passé.

Cats Dream Too I do not know how widely Safouan’s translation of Freud’s Traumdeutung is read, but I have seen it in numerous bookstores in Cairo, and at least three different editions have been published in Egypt. Since Ziwer’s pioneering work more than fifty years ago, the field of psychology has grown steadily in Egypt. Dr. Okasha announced at the eleventh Arab Congress for Psychology in 2003 that Egypt currently has about 1,000 psychiatrists, 2,400 psychologists, 250 clinical psychologists, 1,350 psychiatric nurses, and 9,000 psychiatric beds.8 The Ministry of Education’s official figure states that there are some 6,000 psychological experts in Egypt. An immediate student of Ziwer’s told me that while his cohort consisted of only six or seven people, today one finds two hundred to three hundred psychology students in a single lecture hall at `A ïn Shams University. A similar increase in numbers can be found in other fields as well and does not necessarily reflect more interest in the field of psychology (especially since what Egyptians study in college is generally not a matter of choice but rather is determined based on their performance in high school), yet overcrowded lecture halls might still indicate a certain popularization of the discipline. Currently there are sixteen independent psychology departments in Egypt, as well as forty-four departments of educational psychology and mental health (Soueif 2001, 220).9 This does not mean that all graduates from these departments find

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employment in their field, let alone that they will ever have anything to do with dreams on a professional basis. Although it is relatively easy to receive a license as a psychotherapist from the Ministry of Health, and the numbers of therapists are growing (Soueif 2001), I often heard the complaint that Egyptians are still (or maybe increasingly) reluctant to seek out their help. A psychologist at `A ïn Shams University noted that in the United States, “if you say you’re a psychologist, it carries a lot of weight (ma`nä khatïr giddan). But not here in Egypt.” As we were speaking about social and cultural impediments to therapy, another psychologist asked himself how a woman from the countryside (sitt baladï) could possibly find it proper to lie down on a couch in front of a therapist. “People are ignorant about psychology,” a psychiatrist commented, “so how could they seek it out? They wouldn’t recognize that someone is depressed, but they would say that she’s bewitched (`alayhä sihr).” The optimism of the pioneers seems to have faded, and many psychologists complained to me about an increasing marginalization of their field. Not only does psychology as a whole play a relatively minor role in society; it is also a much-divided field. As Dr. `Abd al-Qädir put it in a public lecture, there is not one psychology (`ilm al-nafs) but many psychologies (`ulüm alnafs). One major divide in Egypt, as elsewhere, lies between psychoanalytic and behavioralist-cognitive approaches. In Egypt, this divide is manifested in the chasm between the department that Ziwer founded at `Aïn Shams University in 1950 and its counterpart at Cairo University, which was founded in 1974. Although psychoanalysis is still central at `Aïn Shams University and is taught at a number of other Egyptian universities as well, it is relatively marginal within the wider field of psychology in Egypt today. Psychologists recall that there were seven Egyptian psychoanalysts at the end of the 1950s but told me that there is not a single properly trained analyst in all of Egypt today (some claimed that there are about two or three, including Nevine Ziwer). Getting trained in psychoanalysis has become rather useless, a number of people remarked, since there are no opportunities to apply it. Analysis is too expensive for most Egyptians, takes too long, and is even more suspect than other forms of therapy. `A ïn Shams University nevertheless takes pride in being psychoanalytically oriented. Those affiliated with its department claim that the psychology department at Cairo University has been deteriorating ever since it began focusing on behavioral psychology. When I told faculty members at `A ïn Shams University that I had attended the annual Arab-Egyptian Psychology Conference at Cairo University, all agreed that I had wasted my time. Freud, dreams, and psychoanalysis, as I had quickly realized

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myself, are just as absent from Cairo University’s campus as they are from Egypt’s psychiatric clinics. “Cats dream too,” psychologists at Cairo University would say to me; “dreaming is nothing but a physiological process.”

Believing in Islam, Believing in Psychoanalysis Egyptian psychologists can be just as dismissive of other schools of psychology as they are of Muslim dream interpreters or healers, whom they tend to call charlatans. While the rise of pharmaceuticals and the biomedical paradigm have undermined psychoanalytic explanatory models in other places as well (cf. Luhrmann 2000), what is striking in Egypt is the way in which psychology’s current impasse is attributed to the recent broad-scale return to religious symbols, rituals, and discourses. In addition to its internal fragmentation, the imported science of the unconscious comes up against religious explanatory systems that offer alternative forms of diagnosis and treatment. One might say that whereas in Europe Freud’s theories were revolutionary because they dethroned the authority of the human mind, showing that the “veritable center of human beings is no longer at the place ascribed to it by an entire humanist tradition” (Lacan 2002, 401), in Egypt Freud’s main challenge is not a humanistic faith in reason but religious faith. Far from Western psychology having displaced religion in Egypt, psychologists frequently pointed out to me that a religious opposition to their science has increased over time. A number of psychologists remarked that in the 1950s, when socialism, nationalism, and an all-encompassing optimism dominated the political sphere, things were much easier than they are now. “Back then you were able to speak against religion,” Nevine Ziwer said. “The upper-middle class didn’t cover their hair, and they didn’t pray in mosques. They went to parties instead. . . . Today, it’s all different; they all cover their hair, pray, and go to religious gatherings. And everybody goes on the pilgrimage.” Explaining the relative failure of her father’s attempts to establish psychoanalysis, Ziwer referred to the Islamic Revival, which has visibly transformed Egypt’s social landscapes since the 1970s. In her eyes, the new religiosity of the elite has made life more difficult for psychoanalysts and other secular professionals. One of Mustafa Ziwer’s former students confirmed that psychoanalysis was much bigger in the ’50s and ’60s than it is now. Today, he commented, “they just go to charlatans (daggälïn), shaykhs, swindlers (musha`widhïn), and sorcerers (sahara).” What they go for, he concluded bitterly, is “treatment through superstition (al-`aläg bi-l-khuräfiyya).”

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Just as al-Hagg Sayyid insisted that it is either Freud or Islam, Egyptian psychologists tend to draw sharp lines between secular and religious fields of knowledge. Instead of rejecting religion as a whole, they often subscribe to a secularized worldview in which religion is a private matter of belief. A young female psychologist said to me, “I’m religious, but it has nothing to do with psychology.” When clients claim that all their dreams come true, she tells them that she does not work in the “field of religion (magäl al-dïn).” In her view all dreams are a “psychological activity (nishät nafsï). They express my psychology (al-sïkulüjïkal bitä`ï); they express desires and struggles (al-raghbät wa-l-sirä`ät).” Nevine Ziwer similarly confines dreams to the psychological while removing the psychological from the realm of religious significance. She leaves a space for religious beliefs but seals them off from her professional practice. In her words: “I’m a Muslim and a believer, but I also believe in psychoanalysis.” Two faiths coexist for her—one is personal, and the other guides her work. While religion is entirely acceptable as a private state of belief, it does not offer an efficacious practice for understanding and healing, and those who draw on it to heal, diagnose, or interpret dreams are “charlatans.” The encounter between psychological experts and these so-called charlatans might well be more charged today than it was when Freud’s theories first arrived in Egypt. And yet it is an encounter not of dichotomously opposed discourses but of discourses that are already mutually engaged.

Between Freud and Ibn SÏrÏn The late Abdelwahhab Elmessiri, a well-known public intellectual in Egypt, once suggested that the rise of psychoanalysis in the West should be understood within the context of a broader materialist paradigm that dominates Western civilization. In this materialist paradigm, wrote Elmessiri (1999, 437), the secular concept of the self (nafs) has replaced the religious concept of the spirit (rüh). (While the word psychology etymologically refers to the study of the soul or spirit, its Arabic equivalent, `ilm al-nafs, is literally the “science of the self.”)10 According to Elmessiri, for those who do not subscribe to a materialist worldview, the science of the self is of little relevance. Although many of my interlocutors would agree with the view that Western psychology in general, and “Freud” in particular, tends to erase the spiritual dimensions of human existence, Elmessiri’s argument is somewhat misleading. By situating psychoanalysis within broader civilizational contexts, he seems to imply that the concept of the self was imported into

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(or imposed on) the Arab world along with a materialist worldview. What such narratives ignore is that various concepts of the self figure already within the Islamic tradition and Arabic literary genres. Sufism, in its early ascetic renderings, placed emphasis on the importance of muhäsaba, which could be translated as self-interrogation or introspection, and the Sufi alHalläj (d. 922) is at times revered as the first “individualistic” Muslim (Asad 2003, 225). The genre of autobiography has a long history in the Arab world and is referred to as tarjamat al-nafs, literally, “translation of the self” (Reynolds 2001; cf. Kafadar 1989). Describing precolonial notions of interiority, Brinkley Messick (2001) has argued that Islamic legal conceptions of intent are predicated upon a historically specific inwardness: intent is located in the heart (qalb), which is part of a larger interior realm of the self (nafs). Similarly, classical Islamic dream models speak of dreams that originate within the self (hadïth nafsï). Thus, while Freud might have introduced a new emphasis, other modes of subjective interiority were already in place. These textual traditions are easily bracketed, however, when Egyptian psychologists contrast their scientific (`ilmï) dream model with its local counterparts, calling the latter “popular (sha`bï)” or “folkloristic (fulklürï).” Only occasionally psychologists referred to the religious dream model as “Ibn Sïrïn,” and one psychoanalyst pointed out to me that al-Ghazälï’s Revival of the Religious Sciences had already been translated into German at the time Freud was writing and might even have influenced him directly. Generally, however, psychologists tend to divorce Muslim dream interpretation from its classical sources, insisting on a gap between textual and popular religious traditions. As one psychologist put it, “Freud has nothing to do with Egypt. What you get here are popular interpretations (tafsïrät sha`biyya). They’re even removed from the shaykhs. The traditional woman (sitt sha`biyya) doesn’t even know Ibn Sïrïn. But she has certain keys [through which she interprets dreams].” While according to this view a “folk knowledge” about dreams might be passed on orally, this knowledge is as far removed from the Islamic textual tradition as it is from modern science. Along the same lines, a high-ranking psychology professor at `A ïn Shams University told me that more than 60 percent of Egyptians are illiterate and do not even know that books such as Ibn Sïrïn’s exist. What you get in Egypt, he concluded, are “folk traditions” and not a “religious tradition.” Accordingly, for many psychologists, popular dream beliefs and practices are at best deemed worthy of investigation to determine how widespread superstitions still are in Egypt—superstitions that should ultimately be replaced with science (`ilm).11 Psychologists’ modern-

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izing calls here resonate with the project of Muslim reformers who have been expressing a particular distaste for the masses’ “superstitious” beliefs since the nineteenth century. In line with these reformist voices, Ziwer’s successors continue to uphold the pioneer’s hope of enlightening Egypt and of sweeping it free of its superstitions. Yet although `ilm is often translated as “science” and juxtaposed with religion, this term too has a long history in Muslim thought. It used to refer to spontaneous knowledge of God, as opposed to ma`rifa, which stood for knowledge acquired through reflection.12 Today ma`rifa generally refers to experiential knowledge and `ilm to the secular sciences. At times, however, `ilm is reclaimed by those speaking from a religious vantage point. Many of my interlocutors called Ibn Sïrïn’s approach to dream interpretation “scientific (`ilmï),” and Qur´anic healers refer to their work as a “spiritual science (`ilm rawhänï).” More important, what critics of “popular dream interpretation” tend to overlook is that even the interpretations that are offered by illiterate Egyptians to a great extent draw on the textual tradition (and often also on imported psychological concepts). One does not need to be literate or possess a copy of Ibn Sïrïn’s manual to be informed by the tradition associated with his name. Dichotomization between a scholarly, scriptural, orthodox, “high” Islam and its popular, mystical, “low” counterpart disregards the intertwined contexts of Muslim practices and authoritative discourses, and it overlooks the fact that those commonly associated with popular Islam generally still aim at practicing their religion in accordance with the textual tradition. To get around such dichotomization, Talal Asad suggests that anthropologists should approach the Islamic tradition as a set of beliefs and practices that is continuously made and remade within particular relations of power and that “includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur´an and the Hadith” (1986, 14). Through this ongoing process, we might add, not only “Islam” but also “Freud” is continuously made and remade.

Responses to Freud How, then, do Muslim dreamers and dream interpreters respond to Western psychology? What is taken to be “satanic” about Freud and what Islamic? How is the Freudian model contested, absorbed, and resignified? And how is the Islamic dream model reimagined in turn? One common reaction to Freud is to say that his claims apply only to one specific kind of dream, the hadïth nafsï, whereas the Islamic dream episteme encompasses a much wider range of dreams. Distinct from devilinduced and divinely inspired dreams, the category of hadïth nafsï refers

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to dreams that mirror the dreamer’s wishes, worries, and fears. Implying a causal link between the dreamer’s inner state and the dream’s content, this category seems to prefigure, or at least to resonate with, the Freudian notion of hallucinatory wish fulfillment. As a housewife in Cairo explained to me: “If you want to see a friend really badly and then you dream of her, it’s a hadïth nafsï.” Explanations of the hadïth nafsï in everyday dream talk and dream literatures often explicitly borrow imported psychological terminologies, explaining, for instance, that dreams of this kind result from “disturbances in thought or psychological illnesses or something the dreamer has eaten before going to sleep” (Ismä`ïl 2002, 7). An imam in the Nile Delta told me, “Such dreams have to do with one’s psychological state (häla nafsiyya). It’s the stuff Freud talks about.” Sometimes the category of devil-induced dreams is also explained in psychological terms. An elderly man remarked, “the devil is a great psychologist (al-shaytän `älim nafsï `alä mustawä)”; he knows people’s desires and takes advantage of them. If the devil interferes too much in your dreams, the man concluded, you end up in an insane asylum. Whereas some liken religious dream categories to Freudian or psychiatric terms, others point out that Freud’s biggest mistake was his obliviousness to other kinds of dreams, since he ignored (or dismissed) the possibility of divinely inspired dream-visions. According to many of my interlocutors, what Freud explained were some but certainly not all dreams. One way of partially bracketing Freud is consequently to categorize particular dreams as dream-visions. Others insist in more absolute terms that Islam and Freudian psychology are entirely incompatible. As the author of one dream book puts it bluntly, Freud’s theory “does not apply to our dreams” (Gamal 1987, 56). At times, Freud is furthermore rejected as a Jewish thinker or even as one of the supposed founders of Israel.13 Alternatively, others argue against his focus on sexual relations. “Freud is wrong,” an imam told me, “because he relates everything back to sex.” In any case, the imam continued, none of the people who go to the mosque and pray regularly will ever need a psychologist. According to this view, Freud is superfluous, unnecessary, and irrelevant to Muslim dreams. One author contrasts two kinds of dream interpretation: one is Western, and the other is Eastern. He associates the former with Aristotle, Freud, professors at Cairo University, and the Egyptian Ministry of Health, and he calls it scientific (`ilmï). The latter, represented by Ibn Sïrïn, is traditional (usülï). He concludes that since Western scientific views change over time, the God-given, unchanging, Eastern, traditional approach is clearly preferable (Sabähï 2002, 17ff.).

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Besides rebuking Freud for having reduced all dreams to a single category, and besides claiming that Freud has nothing to do with Muslim dreams, there is a third possible reaction to Freud, and the natural sciences more generally. This response consists of the widespread reformist claim of “that’s what we’ve been saying all along.” The nature of microbes, the ozone layer, the shape of the moon’s orbit around the earth, and human embryonic development, according to certain reformist interpretations, are all already prefigured in the Qur´an (Abaza 2002). Not surprisingly, then, a modern Islamic psychology was developed in the latter half of the twentieth century that equates Qur´anic concepts with their Freudian counterparts: al-nafs al-amära becomes the id, al-nafs al-lawäma the superego, and al-nafs al-mutma´inna the ego.14 Mustafa Mahmüd, a popular religious figure in Egypt, wrote a book titled Qur´anic Psychology,15 and Muslim scholars in the Gulf States and Malaysia have been active in working toward an Islamization of psychology, taking writings by medieval Muslim scholars such as al-Kindï, al-Tabarï, al-Räzï, al-Färäbï, Ibn Sïnä, al-Ghazälï, Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd as possible starting points (Haque 1997). With regard to the “Islamization of medicine” in Egypt, Soheir Morsy (1988) has suggested that such attempts might best be read as a particular manifestation of biomedical hegemony and not as a revival of Islamic medical traditions. A similar argument could be made with regard to the Islamization of psychology. The very attempt to prove that the Qur´an already prefigures all the achievements of modern science ultimately concedes to, and reinscribes, the hegemony of the latter. Three common reactions to the Freudian legacy are thus as follows: compartmentalizing it as applying only to certain kinds of dreams, entirely rejecting it, or claiming that it has nothing new to offer. While these discursive reactions are telling and to some extent predictable, a closer look at Egypt’s dream landscapes reveals that “Freud” and “Islam” are rarely stable entities. We next turn to three interpretive moments centering on terms that many Egyptians (and, surely, many readers) would primarily associate with Freud: desire and the unconscious. As will be shown, far from being stable and unambiguous, these terms are characterized by a textual and lived heteroglossia as they carry within them multiple layers and possibilities of meaning. Paying attention to these heteroglossias does not imply that everyday life is best understood as a free flow and intermingling of multiple ideas and practices. Rather, close ethnographic attention to interplays will inevitably also alert us to the power relations that pervade, shape, and delimit all interchanges. These power relations, however, are themselves rarely stable.

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The Unconscious Resignified The Freudian model posits the unconscious as a positive fact whose contents might be hard to discern but whose function and ways of functioning are fully knowable. While Freud synthesized previous theories of the unconscious, drawing in part on philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as on previous developments in dynamic psychiatry, Jacques Lacan emphasized that the Freudian unconscious should be understood in its historical particularity, as distinct from both the “romantic unconscious of imaginative creation” and the “locus of the divinities of the night” (1978, 24). Diverging from romantic and religious understandings, Freud’s unconscious is a system rooted inside the human subject, and its main function is the fulfillment of wishes. Along with the practice of psychoanalysis, Mustafa Ziwer imported this distinct Freudian notion of the unconscious into Egypt. Adopting the idea that all dreams originate inside the dreamer, Egyptian psychologists tend to deny the possibility that dreams can offer insight into a metaphysical Unknown, al-ghayb. Rather than refute the existence of this metaphysical realm altogether, they often refer to the Qur´anic verses stating that only God has keys to al-ghayb. For psychologists—as for Muslim reformers—the Unknown is unknowable, and even dream-visions in which one encounters the Prophet or the awliyä´ are ultimately caused by the dreamer’s unconscious desire for these nightly encounters to happen. Such psychological modes of argumentation, however, can be picked up and resignified by religious dream interpreters. While it is heavy with cultural baggage, the unconscious is not a stable term but can itself become a tool that offers access to al-ghayb. On this view, far from being the sole and mechanistic source of dreams, the unconscious is a medium of communication with a supernatural Elsewhere. An interpretation offered by Shaykh Nabil can illustrate this ongoing resignification.

Huda’s Dream Huda, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Cairo, once posted a question on the Web site for which Shaykh Nabil interprets dreams. A few days later, the journalist who delivers printouts of the posted questions to the shaykh brought Huda’s dream to Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine, along with many others. Shaykh Nabil received the stack of papers, sat down inside the shrine, and began to read. Huda had written the following: “I saw in my sleep one of my dear friends, and he was dead. In truth he’s not dead. Twice a month I have this dream, and every time I wake up and find myself crying. I also

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cry in the dream.” Other dreams in the stack were longer, others even shorter; some were more vivid or more dramatic. Huda’s dream was not exceptional in any way. Without a moment of hesitation, Shaykh Nabil jotted down his response on the lower half of the page: “The message is from the unconscious (al-lä wa`y), and it points to a happy future. It is a glad tiding (bushrä) of the death of the past, of the beginning of the future, and of leaving behind hardships. The symbol of death in the dream is the death of the past. We die in the dream and wake up to new life. [The dream] directs you to a happy future.” The effect apparently intended by Shaykh Nabil’s interpretation was to dispel Huda’s worries. According to his response, she had nothing to be concerned about. The dream that had troubled her turned out to be a glad tiding, a bushrä, a foretelling of her happy future. The term bushrä is derived from the same root as mubashshirät (glad tidings), which the Prophet Muhammad announced to be the only form of prophecy that would be left after his death. When asked what glad tidings are, the Prophet answered, truthful dream-visions. Shaykh Nabil interpreted Huda’s dream as a dream-vision, and he stuck closely to traditional schemes in decoding its central symbols. What was unusual in the interpretation was Shaykh Nabil’s employment of the term unconscious. “The message is from the unconscious,” he wrote, using the Arabic term al-lä wa`y, borrowed from modern psychology and used interchangeably with the term al-`aql albätin (inner mind) in Egypt.16 One man explained to me,“When we sleep, the awareness shuts down and the ‘inner mind’ works so that memories come up. When I see a beautiful woman, for example, I might then dream of her.” Similarly, Madame Salwa told me that some dreams are only the “inner mind talking. If you’re mad at someone, for example, you dream that you’re beating her.” Shaykh Mustafa likened the unconscious to an archive in which happy and sad memories are stored. Dreams that draw on these memories, he explained, are dreams from inside the dreamer: “Through the unconscious one receives only meaningless dreams (ahädïth nafsiyya).” According to one Azharite shaykh, If you dream that you’re running away from someone, or that someone is about to kill you, it doesn’t mean that it will actually happen. Dreams are really just translations of something that you’ve been thinking about; they’re a translation by way of your unconscious. They don’t mean anything more than that. Of course, there are also dream-visions. For example, if I see in a dream-vision that I go on the pilgrimage, and I get on the plane, then I will actually perform the

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pilgrimage. Or if I see that I go to a mosque and pray, then it is also a dream-vision.

On this view, some dreams come from the unconscious and merely reflect one’s thoughts, feelings, and wishes; others are dream-visions and move in an entirely different realm of signification. The Arabic terms for “inner mind” and “unconscious” generally refer to a place inside the dreamer in which meaningless dreams originate—a place that seems to be roughly equivalent to the Freudian unconscious. Shaykh Nabil himself once likened the hadïth nafsï to a stage play in which the unconscious is both the stage and the director. In a newspaper interview he explained, “Our dreams are deeply related to our emotional states (infi`älät), our fears, and our . . . desires, also our needs and memories. The stage of our dreams is our unconscious (lä-wa`yunä), which chooses the topic of the performance.”17 Dreams that reflect the dreamer’s wishes or fears are referred to in the classical dream manuals as adghäth ahläm (confused dreams or false dreams), and they are considered meaningless. Dream-visions, on the other hand, are received by the dreamer’s heart (qalb), spirit (rüh), or inner sight (basïra), and they are taken to be of a prophetic nature. Yet in contradistinction to the Freudian model and to classical dream literatures, Shaykh Nabil allows for dreams—in fact, most dreams—both to originate in the unconscious and to contain an element of divine guidance. As he states, Huda’s dream is a “message from the unconscious” and simultaneously a “glad tiding.” Puzzled by this interpretation, I asked Shaykh Nabil a few days later if he could explain to me how a dream that comes from the unconscious can tell Huda something about the future. How can it be a bushrä, a glad tiding? Would not a dream that springs from the unconscious merely reflect Huda’s wishes? Where does her dream originate: in her unconscious or in a metaphysical Elsewhere? Shaykh Nabil seemed slightly irritated by my questions, which implied that his practices should submit to a logic of either/or. Nevertheless, he explained to me, once again, that things do not have to be so black and white. The unconscious, he said, is located in the heart. Our ordinary consciousness is at work while we are awake, and the unconscious is the organ through which we see when we are asleep. The unconscious is the same as our inner gaze (basïra), and it is much stronger than the conscious mind because “it takes [inspiration] from the Eternal Tablet (ta´khudh min al-lawh al-mahfüz).” Shaykh Nabil’s suggestion that the unconscious has access to the Eternal Tablet is highly significant because the latter gener-

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ally refers to an archetypal repository of the Qur´an, or more broadly a heavenly tablet on which all human destinies are inscribed. According to some dream manuals, dream angels read the dream-vision on the Eternal Tablet and then deliver it to the dreamer, either by showing it to her inner gaze or by telling it to her. By claiming that the “unconscious” has access to this Eternal Tablet, Shaykh Nabil turns the unconscious into a medium that offers dreamers insight not into the depths of the human psyche but into a metaphysical Elsewhere. The unconscious here does not reflect childhood memories or repressed wishes; rather, it can reveal a timeless Truth and offer insight into the future. Whereas for Freud the concept of the unconscious served as evidence that dreams cannot come from a metaphysical Elsewhere, Shaykh Nabil (maybe unknowingly) challenges this assumption. For him the unconscious is the immediate source of the dream, but ultimately it belongs to God and is operated by His will. Shaykh Nabil’s interpretation of Huda’s dream effectively resignifies the Freudian unconscious. This does not mean that Shaykh Nabil is unfamiliar with Freud’s theories. The first time “Freud” came up in one of our conversations, the shaykh gave me a minilecture, telling me that Freud was from Vienna, that for him all dreams—even children’s dreams—are about the “unconscious, desire, and sex,” and that he was the founder of the “school of dream interpretation (madrasat tafsïr al-ahläm).” Whereas other Muslim dream interpreters are dismissive of Freud and claim that his theory at best applies to meaningless dreams, Shaykh Nabil has no problem with evoking Freud when interpreting dreams in Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine, and he lists Freud as one of the sources in his book, which aims at bringing the Muslim tradition of dream interpretation “up to date.” Yet ultimately, he told me, Ibn Sïrïn is more popular today. While Shaykh Nabil is conversant with the Freudian concept of wish fulfillment, he subsumes Freud’s terms under his own dream theory, which implies a less sealed model of the self than that underlying the Freudian paradigm, where the unconscious (while always out of reach) is the ultimate source of the dream. Shaykh Nabil agrees that most dreams arise from a person’s preoccupations, but what is seen in the dream can exceed the dreamer. “Say your friend gets married,” he suggested once, “and you want to get married too, then you might dream of it.” So far he sounded quite Freudian, but the shaykh added, “It’s a manifestation (tagallï) from God. It’s your hope.” Wanting to get married and dreaming of getting married seem to fall perfectly in line with the causality intrinsic to the Freudian notion of hallucinatory wish fulfillment, but for Shaykh Nabil

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the dream is always more. It is both a hope and a divine sign. Although the notion that dream-visions both come to and extend out from the dreamer is not a modern phenomenon, one might say that Freudian psychology has provided Shaykh Nabil with a new vocabulary for talking about the relationship between the religious self and an Elsewhere. A dream, according to his semi-Freudian interpretation, can be at the same time a hope and a manifestation from God. Even ordinary dreams can then be prophetic. As Shaykh Nabil’s interpretation of Huda’s dream shows, interplays between different epistemes can be quite subtle. Shaykh Nabil does not simply “update” the Islamic tradition by infusing it with Freud; he also turns Freud upside down. “Freud was right,” he once explained to me, “when he said that the dream is a link (wasta) between sleep and waking state. It’s a link like a telephone. The waking world is a realization (tanfïdh) of the dream world.” Whereas for Freud the dream (or rather, the dreamer’s free associations) can help us understand more fully what moves us in our waking life, for Shaykh Nabil waking life is but an interpretation of the dream. Thus, when Muslim dream interpreters take up concepts like the unconscious, the terminology is not simply recycled, it can also take on new meanings, recalling Michel de Certeau’s insight (1984) that each consumption is also a kind of production, and that everyday life is about navigating and creatively using imposed products, spaces, and languages. Shaykh Nabil’s use of “the unconscious” exemplifies such creative redeployment. De Certeau might call the shaykh’s interpretive move reading-as-poaching, and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1968) might refer to it as bricolage, the creative drawing together of different things out of which something new emerges. Regardless of what we call this process, the meanings of dreams, Islam, and reality are constantly renegotiated and remade in Egypt—by dreamers, interpreters, psychologists, and the occasional anthropologist alike. Today this ongoing remaking of meaning takes place not only in bedrooms, in psychologists’ offices, in saint shrines, and on the pages of academic books, but also in a number of mass-mediated realms. As the next two examples show, television in particular has opened up new spaces for the interplay of different dream idioms.

Waking Vision or Hallucination? Earlier I discussed the sudden end of Ru´ä, a popular TV show on which viewers at home would call in to ask about their dreams, and two dream experts would respond to their inquiries. One of these experts was Shaykh

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Hanafi, an Azharite religious scholar who over time had become a TV star; the other was a professor of clinical psychology. Ru´ä premiered in January 2002, and by the time the show was taken off the air in January 2003, it had been broadcast a total of fifty-four times; according to Shaykh Hanafi, he had interpreted between four hundred and five hundred dream-visions on it. In chapter 1 I considered several aspects of dream interpretation that have rendered it problematic in the eyes of Muslim reformers and state officials, to the point that the program needed to be censored. Here I look at Ru´ä from a different angle, analyzing it as a sphere in which claims to expertise are established and contested.18 To consider what happens when a dream or vision moves from one set of references to another, let us turn to an example in which Shaykh Hanafi and a psychologist, Dr. Fathï, are responding to the same caller.

Nahed’s Vision Shaykh Hanafi has just finished interpreting the vision of a woman named Nahed. “Of course the shaykh is right; I agree with everything he said,” offers Dr. Fathï. “I would just like to add something.” The host seems annoyed. Dr. Fathï is not supposed to add anything. He should now be interpreting a different dream, a dream about billowing plumes of black smoke, belonging to a caller from Jeddah. The shaykh has decided that this next dream is for Dr. Fathï; there is nothing in it that he would like to comment on. Yet Dr. Fathï wants to remark on the previously told waking vision. Ignoring the host’s annoyed look, Dr. Fathï continues: “Sometimes people see or hear things that aren’t real. It’s something they make up with their imagination or a disturbance in their senses. If you start acting upon things you see or hear that aren’t real, it can get dangerous. I advise you to talk to a psychological expert.” The camera moves back to the shaykh. No reaction. The host again urges Dr. Fathï to speak about the dream with black smoke. The psychologist’s implicit suggestion that the woman who had called in to the show might be delusional or maybe even schizophrenic seems out of place and uncalled for. The psychologist’s medical referral is ignored. The show moves on. The vision to which the psychologist was so eager to respond out of turn belonged to Nahed, a woman calling from Cairo, who sounded agitated and disconcerted. She said, Assalämu `Alaykum. I want to talk to the shaykh. Any dream I dream comes true. All my dreams come true, all of them. My father is the shaykh of a mosque, and some of my relatives used to treat people with

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the Qur´an. And as for me, all my dreams come true. Many dead people give me messages while I’m asleep, during my sleep, and they ask me to let their families know. So I let them know and indeed what I tell them comes true. I feel very tired inside, and I really want to find some rest. My father asked at al-Azhar, and they said that what I see is true but that didn’t calm me down. The daughter of my husband’s aunt died. So I went to the cemetery. It was the first time that I went to the cemetery—I usually don’t go to cemeteries—but I went so that people wouldn’t talk about me. I saw her. I found her; I found her face at the place where she was buried.

The shaykh interrupts her: “While you’re sleeping? You saw her in your sleep?” “No, I went; it was real, true.” “While you were awake?” asks the shaykh. In reality (fi-l-ha´ï´a). While I was sitting there. I saw her face on the floor in the place where she is buried. It wasn’t just her; I also saw other faces around her. I saw many faces but of course they didn’t talk. But that face—it was my husband’s aunt’s daughter, the one that died. I found her smiling because her children . . . she saw small children. I saw that she saw them, and she smiled. Then her sister came and took them and went away. And she cried and said, “When will you visit me again?” So I went and brought them and made them sit with her, and she smiled again.

Nahed is used to her dreams coming true, and she finds this foreknowledge tiring. Even more troubling to her is the waking vision that she saw at the cemetery. Anxious to learn what she should make of this experience, she offers her greetings and immediately asserts that she wants to talk to the shaykh. Every time I watched video recordings of Ru´ä, I was struck by how many of the callers tried to circumvent the psychologist, either explicitly by stating that they wanted to talk to the shaykh, or implicitly by categorizing their dreams as dream-visions. Although Ru´ä seemingly resembles the confessional mode of Western talk shows, by requesting to speak to the shaykh, dreamers evade the possibility of a potentially embarrassing exposure. By already assuming that their dream is a dreamvision and framing it accordingly, they anticipate a reassuring response. Their claim to have seen a dream-vision presents them as good Muslims, and often the shaykh will reaffirm this claim. Even when he decides that a particular dream was sent by the devil, the dreamers are absolved of their direct responsibility for its content. Thus, while Ru´ä stages highly public dream-tellings, the program is rarely confessional—at least not as long as

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the dreamers get the shaykh to interpret their dreams. When the psychologists contribute their views, the dreamers might be confronted with more embarrassing interpretations, ones that claim to uncover repressed wishes or to detect personality disorders. Nahed uses a number of strategies to assure that the shaykh and not the psychologist will comment on her experiences. She introduces herself as someone whose dreams always come true; she emphasizes her family’s religious background; and she mentions that al-Azhar, the authoritative institution of Sunni Islam, has previously been consulted. She closes with questions for the shaykh: “What does all this mean? What is the interpretation? Is it true or false?” The host immediately turns to the shaykh to ask for his comments, and not even the cameraman deems it worthwhile to film the psychologist’s reaction. This is not his realm; he is literally out of the picture. Before Dr. Fathï contributes his unsolicited opinion, the shaykh explains that Nahed must be clairvoyant, and that through her strong capacity for feeling (ahsäs) she can see things others fail to see, invisible things. What she needs to do, the shaykh suggests, is to strengthen the light inside her even more. This can be done through a number of practices. She should perform her ablutions before going to sleep, perform all prayers on time, seek refuge with God, memorize parts of the Qur´an, recite them in the morning and evening, and praise the Prophet more. It is typical that the shaykh gives advice on how one could further increase one’s spiritual vision. While already equipped with a high level of clairvoyance, he says, Nahed can do more, see more, and she should not worry. He reminds her that the Prophet used to greet the dead in the cemetery, that he had very strong senses, and could even see and hear while he was sleeping. Like him, ordinary believers can enter into various relationships of exchange with the dead—particularly through their dreams. Although Shaykh Hanafi tries to clarify whether Nahed saw the dead girl in a dream or while awake, it makes little difference to him in the end, since the Arabic term ru´yä refers to both dream-visions and waking visions and both are considered windows into the metaphysical realm of the Unknown. For the psychologist, by contrast, the woman’s claim to have seen the deceased girl “in reality” is an indication that she should seek professional help. His suggestion that the woman might have hallucinatory tendencies radically diverges from the shaykh’s assurance that it is entirely normal for spiritually advanced people to see the dead. The psychologist pathologizes Nahed; the shaykh commends her for her spiritual capacities. Dr. Fathï, a professor at `A ïn Shams University, represents the Freudian

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legacy. His authority is established through his institutional affiliation, his degree, his professional outfit (suit and tie), and his repeated references to the findings of “foreign studies (abhäth agnabiyya).” Shaykh Hanafi wears traditional Azharite attire and draws his authority from his Azharite background, his in-depth study of texts of the Islamic tradition, and his claim to divine inspiration. While both shaykh and psychologist are experts, in the particular context of the TV program the shaykh’s interpretations hold greater value. The psychologist’s view is relegated by Nahed’s insistence that she wants to talk to the shaykh, by the moderator urging that the psychologist move on to the next caller’s dream, and by the cameraman framing out the psychologist. On Ru´ä, a popular show in which a large audience can participate, the shaykh is in charge. Not only does Dr. Fathï need to introduce his hesitant suggestion by first agreeing with the shaykh (“Of course the shaykh is right”), but also his interpretations remain supplementary and are generally only drawn on if the shaykh deems it necessary. A number of psychologists told me that they were invited to participate in Ru´ä but declined the offer precisely because the shaykh’s interpretations would ultimately always override theirs. In the end, their expertise was dispensable. As Shaykh Hanafi himself pointed out to me, he could easily interpret all dreams without the help of a psychologist because dream-visions, nightmares, and psychologically explainable dreams all fall within the scope of Islamic dream interpretation. (And indeed, when he later started his own satellite TV program, he did so without including a psychologist.) We do not know what Nahed did with the two divergent interpretations, and whether either one of them helped her feel less disconcerted. Yet what this example shows is that, along with social contexts, the authority of interpretive approaches can shift. Furthermore, as we will see next, not only is the psychologists’ authority at times undermined, they can also become entangled in religious rhetoric.

“Hungry People Dream of Bread” During my fieldwork I met a retired Lacanian psychoanalyst whom I will call Dr. Hakim. I visited Dr. Hakim a number of times because I enjoyed his profound knowledge of European and Arabic literatures and his detailed memories of the early years of psychology in Egypt. He, by contrast, seemed somewhat ambivalent about our meetings and my research. Although he was generally welcoming, Dr. Hakim was highly critical of popular dream beliefs and seemed annoyed by my interest in the work of Muslim dream interpreters. “They’re all charlatans,” he said whenever I told him about the

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shaykhs I worked with. “Dreams are not about prophecy (tanabbu´) at all; they’re about desire (raghba).” During one of our conversations I brought up the program Ru´ä, and, not surprisingly, Dr. Hakim was dismissive of the show, which for him was all about superstition and had nothing to do with science. He then mentioned in passing that in the late 1990s he participated in a dream show on a Saudi Arabian satellite television station. Curious about the show, I borrowed a stack of videotapes from Dr. Hakim and watched them at home. The program, as I noted with surprise, was called Allähumma Aj`alu Khayr, a religious phrase meaning “may God make it turn out well,” which, when used in the context of dream conversations, generally expresses the hope for a divinely inspired dream-vision. In spite of its name, the program approached dream interpretation as a tool for uncovering repressed feelings about family relations, sexual fantasies, Oedipal complexes, marriage problems, and, in the case of viewers calling from abroad, homesickness (ghurba). At times, political issues also came up, particularly in the case of dreams related to Palestine. (According to Dr. Hakim, the occasional political undertone was the reason for the show’s eventual discontinuation.) Dreams are not meaningless in this show. In the lead-in they are praised for offering access to a mysterious world (`älam ghämid) and for allowing us to journey to an Other shore (shäti´ äkhar). While the Other shore in this context is not a metaphysical space but the unconscious, nevertheless, religious explanations are not entirely absent from the program. Besides the decor, which featured two psychologists on black leather seats placed on top of clouds—godlike, one might say—what intrigued me most about the show was the complex interpretive field the psychologists had to navigate in the course of taping it. For instance, they had to respond to dreams such as the following ones related by a woman calling from Qatar: “I have recurrent dreams, spiritual dreams; I’m in contact with people. I’m afraid when I wake up. After my father died, I still used to communicate with him. The Prophet also comes to me in my dreams. At first I was not sure whether it was he, but then I prayed istikhära to find out, and I saw him again. . . . Does that mean I’m clairvoyant?” 19 Knowing Dr. Hakim, I would have expected a triple negation: No, it’s not really the Prophet you see; you only want to see him. No, istikhära does not provide answers. And no, you’re not clairvoyant. From Dr. Hakim’s customary point of view, wanting to see the Prophet and truly seeing the Prophet are separated by an insurmountable gap. Yet the religious content of the dream, and perhaps the fact that the

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Figure 8. Two psychologists interpreting dreams on the Saudi television program Allähumma Aj `alu Khayr.

program was broadcast on a channel based in Saudi Arabia, made such a bluntly negative answer impossible.20 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

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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. Only 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 reaffirmation of the psychological model’s authority. Instead, I 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

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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 rebuffing the former—cannot 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, I 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

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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,21 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 conflicting 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 I 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 of what dreams are and where they come from. Much of this reimagining today takes place 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 to a 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 Sïdï Saläh [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 Sïdï Saläh asked them, “Is this the latest you received?” And they answer yes. al-Say yida 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. I would like to agree, but I 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? I would have liked to see the tombs but did not think of Cairo’s outskirts as a village. Calling them a qarya 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

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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, I 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 I 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. I 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 I 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 I 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, I 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. I 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. I 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 I made one last attempt to find out where we were going. `Umar said that I should let myself be surprised but he could promise me that I 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-qarya 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

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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 environments. Different sections cover ancient Egypt, Islamic architecture, arts and crafts, 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 2,000 years ago.”1 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. I 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, I 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, I repeatedly stumbled across them during

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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 Nafïsa’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. I 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, I hope, these four excursions will offer the reader a sense of the dream-vision’s ambiguous fate in the media age.2 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.

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Junctures 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. I 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 I 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.3 Months after I had returned to New York from my fieldwork, `Umar sent me, as an e-mail attachment, a song that had been recorded at the group’s hadra, and which, he suggested, I should use as a ring tone for my cell phone. The hadra 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 coffee 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 hadra’s impact spills out past the mosque’s walls and at times—as in the case of the e-mail attachment I received while in New York—even beyond the borders of the nation-state. Others participate in the hadra by way of their spiritual connectedness.

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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.4 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-Shädhilï’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 half 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

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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 Sufi 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 Mustafa described the danger of such an overexposure in the following way: “Say you’re doing dhikr, 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 daräwïsh, 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. I 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-Ghazälï, who believed that the “masses” are unable to grasp

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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, I next revisit Shaykh Nabil’s interpretive work.

Cyber Interpretations One afternoon toward the end of my fieldwork, I arrived at Ibn Sïrïn’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 (istifsärät) about dream-visions (ru´ä),” he said formally, handing the card to the women. “Dream-visions?” “Dreams (ahläm),” said the shaykh to simplify matters. “What do you mean?” the second woman asked, now also confused. “If 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 Nabïl Muhammad Ibn Sïrïn, the successor (khalïfa) of Ibn Sïrïn,” 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 I to say that Ibn Sïrïn 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

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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 fieldwork 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 Ibn Sïrïn.”

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.5 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. “Ibn Sïrïn” has become a readily evocable reference, a token if not a commodity of sorts. Who exactly Ibn Sïrïn 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 Sïrïn’s shrine asked whether he was one of the shaykhs depicted in the photographs on the wall, seemingly unaware that Ibn Sïrïn died in the eighth century. Although laypersons might not be able to place Ibn Sïrïn in his correct historical context, they can easily refer to their copy of his dream manual, or they recall from memory that “Ibn Sïrïn said . . . ” Next to al-Näbulusï’s and Ibn Sïrïn’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, God’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 Ibn Sïrïn up-to-date; others are marketed as “Ibn Sïrïn” while merging his

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Figure 9. One of the many dream booklets that are sold on Cairo’s streets.

views with psychological paradigms or proclaiming Ibn Sïrïn to be the first “Muslim psychoanalyst.” Some name Ibn Sïrïn as the author; others state on the cover that Ibn Sïrïn’s text was “studied and examined” by the contemporary author, and still others specify that that the editor “reordered” Ibn Sïrïn’s and al-Näbulusï’s heritage for the contemporary reader. Even those booklets that evoke Ibn Sïrïn 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-turäth al-`azïm),” which it defines as encompassing the writings of al-Näbulusï, Ibn Sïrïn, and Ibn Shähïn (Hakïm 1999, 5). The dream booklets, which are sometimes also labeled “dream diction-

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ary (qämüs al-ahläm),” 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]” (Khattäb 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 [own] dreams” (Saftï 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 (basïra) can interpret [dreams]” (13). Similarly, a scholar who translated Ibn Sïrïn’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. I found a number of interpretations for it, and I 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 walls of Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine,

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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 firäsa, 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 firäsa can be effective only if a dream is in the dreamer’s own handwriting, not if it is printed.6 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. I 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 (`alä mustawä al-`älam 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

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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 istikhära 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”; “I woke up scared”; “This dream bothers me very much”; “I’ve been depressed and afraid; please interpret the dream”). Generally, the dreamer’s interference 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 (isläh) 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 Sïrïn’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

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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 cafés. 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 I 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. Fatäwä is the plural of fatwä, 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 ahlam (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 and 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 Nabïl Muhammad Ibn Sïrïn 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.g., “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-

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preter is also. Both dream and interpretation are isolated from their places of origin. As Brinkley Messick notes with regard to Yemeni radio muftis, “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 muftis, 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 Sïrïn’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 Nabïl Muhammad Ibn Sïrïn the Egyptian” and simply addressed as “Dear honored shaykh (hadrat al-shaykh al-fädil; Sïdï 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 (yä 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! (Habibtï, isma`ï kalämï!).” While interpreting, the shaykh might ask about the dreamer’s background or use the skill of firäsa 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.7

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The Internet has expanded Shaykh Nabil’s interpretive work, but it has simultaneously narrowed it. Dream talk, dream interpretations, and dream enactments, as I 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 Sïrïn’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 “If you have a TV,” Shaykh Hanafi once said to me, “then the world is open to you. You see the news and so on. All 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.8 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

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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 I 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 (hilm). I 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 I was worried. I was studying at a desk where I had 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 I 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. I 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.9 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 (tagallï), 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

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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 found 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.10 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 differ 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 (shuhadä´ al-`ayn) and rely on committees sent to apparition sites. In the case of Zaytoun, the police searched a radius of twenty-four

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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.11 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 I 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 text 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

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can furthermore help produce visible signs of the invisible. A dervish once explained to me the art of istihdär, of making present the absent. He asked if I had ever been to Abü al-Hasan al-Shädhilï’s shrine, which is located in Upper Egypt and which, at that point, I had not yet visited. “Do you want me to bring al-Shädhilï here?” the dervish continued. “How much would you pay?” He got out his wallet and took out a small photograph of al-Shädhilï’s shrine. Implied in the dervish’s half-joking performance of istihdär 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-Shädhilï to where I was, to Cairo, to the coffee shop in which we were sitting, the dervish’s act of istihdär performed a work similar to what a dream-vision could have done. Although he was not all that serious about his performance, it hints at something that the art of istihdär, 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 Salafi 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 specific 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 `Uqba Ibn `Ämir in Cairo’s City of the Dead. When I visited the mosque, a poster caught my eye; it fea-

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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 illähä illä Alläh Muhammadun rasül Alläh (There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Prophet). The trees pronounce the shahäda, 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 (dïn 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. I 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 Rüz alYüsuf, an article that exposes the image as digitally fabricated. 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!”12 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 Alläh, 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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Figure 10. “Allah” on a piece of bread, Rüz al-Yüsuf, 3 June 2003.

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

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indescribable array of photographs, obtained in every imaginable manner” (2005, 50f.). 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.13 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 I 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, I overheard her telling the shaykh that she had seen the word Alläh 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

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somewhat 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 I remain hard-of-sight and because many Egyptians are so as well, the media have become crucial for 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 for narrating dream-visions or waking visions to those who, like me, are blind.

Metaphors Friday sermons in Egypt (especially the particularly 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).14 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 frequently 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. I know people here who have to see the Prophet twice a day. . . . We see things; we see ahl al-bayt [the Prophet’s

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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-khayäl, 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

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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 for 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 (arwäh, sing. rüh) 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 angels’ 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.15 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).

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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 Mustafa’s account of the miracle (karäma) story of Säriya and Caliph `Umar Ibn al-Khattäb—a story frequently told by my interlocutors when explaining the nature of spiritual sight. As the story goes, Säriya was sent out to Persia as the head of a military campaign. `Umar Ibn al-Khattäb was giving a Friday sermon in Mecca and suddenly, completely out of context, exclaimed, “O Säriya, 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 Säriya’s enemies were going to attack from behind the mountain. Because Säriya 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 Säriya’s hearing normally this refined. Rather, Shaykh Mustafa explained, it was God who temporarily empowered `Umar’s vision and voice, as well as Säriya’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 Mustafa 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 really 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” on a 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

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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 (shafäfiyya), 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.16 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 (shäshät) in front of our eyes, and that on these screens we will see the Real (al-haqq) 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, straightforward 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

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viewed” (1996, 122f.). 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, I 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

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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 I 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 from now. It’s him!” Shaykh Nabil interrupted her: “Do you believe everything? The films are simply going to increase (wa hataktar al-afläm).” 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-zähir, are easily misled. It is the invisible where truth is to be found. What we commonly 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 (tafsïr). 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. I didn’t understand it at first, which is why I was disappointed

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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 Benjamin

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

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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 I 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, I 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 four shaykhs in particular: Shaykh Nabil, the guardian of Ibn Sïrïn’s shrine; Shaykh Qusi, a charismatic spiritual leader; Shaykh Mustafa, the imam of a Sufi mosque; and Shaykh Hanafi, 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-khayäl enables a form of being in the world that is foreclosed by rational, abstract thought. Instead of aiming for autonomy, al-khayäl embraces in-betweenness. Instead of prioritizing the visible here-and-now, it ties believers to multiple pasts and futures.

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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.1 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 channel 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. Countering 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 istikhära prayer through which believers seek a direct

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line of communication with God, today almost everyone I talked to had an istikhära 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 repeatedly 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 I 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). If a 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 mental 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 traffic 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

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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 nonfactual, 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, I 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 I heard in Egypt had explicitly political content (most often concerning Iraq or Palestine). Other vision-stories described how invisible forces actively partake in wars. I was told, for instance, that angels and saints were collectively sighted among the Egyptians fighting in

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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.2 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-Sabähï, who founded the small Egyptian party Hizb al-Umma because of a dream-vision he had seen.3 While the party is not taken too seriously by most Egyptians I know, Shaykh Sabähï 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.4 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 life-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 awliyä´, 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-ghayb, 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

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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 future. 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, I 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 interlocutors’ dream discourses does not mean that I 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 I 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, I 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, I 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,

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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, symbol and symbolized. 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, I was confronted by the unexpected announcement that “Shaykh Qusi has passed into the realm of the Prophet.” Sïdï had died during Ramadan. A feeling of regret: Why didn’t I 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

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to tell me about them someday. “Secrets,” he added, and smiled. Not only was I never going to hear those secrets, but I 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 I had often fantasized about; it was also a moment I 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 for 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 I will leave a copy in the mosque where the shaykh was buried.5 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, I tried calling some of his followers, and when I 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, I would see the shaykh in my own dreams after reading al-Fätiha before going to sleep. I 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, I am glad to know that in this way, regardless of my own dreams, I too will be able to stay in touch with the shaykh.

Notes

Introduction 1. In the Egyptian context, shisha (shïsha) 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 and to arrest and detain suspects indefinitely and without charge. 3. I 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. I 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-Haqq)” 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, I intend to highlight its social constructedness. 6. In the Qur´an the term awliyä´ appears in the verse “Oh, verily, they who are close to God (awliyä´ Alläh)—no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve” (10:62). In Egypt the term most often refers to the Prophet’s

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descendants. Although translating awliyä´ as “saints” is problematic because of the latter term’s Christian connotations, I use the words interchangeably for the sake of readability. One central difference between Christian and Muslim saints is that there is no formal process of canonization for the latter. 7. I 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. 9. Literally, the Persian and Arabic term barzakh means “obstacle,” “hindrance,” or “separation.” See “barzakh” in the Encyclopedia of Islam (henceforth EI). On the barzakh as an in-between space that is closely related to the imagination, particularly in Ibn al-`Arabï and al-Ghazälï, 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-`Arabï 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 (Hoffman-Ladd 1992; Knysh 1999). Furthermore, borrowing conceptual frameworks from Ibn al-`Arabï or al-Ghazälï, 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). 11. 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, I 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

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dreams and their interpretation, such as Bäb al-Ta`bïr (The Chapter of Interpretation) in Sahïh al-Bukhärï and Kitäb al-Ru´yä (The Book of Dream-Visions) in Sahïh 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 Qur´an, spirits (junün; 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 rüh, which is often translated as soul or spirit. For more details on the rüh, see chapter 3. 15. The word ru´yä appears six times in the Qur´an, and the word hulm twice. The latter appears in its plural form both times and has negative connotations, implying “confused dreams (adghäth ahläm),” literally meaning bunches or muddles of dreams. A hadith affirms the negative connotation of the hulm: “The dream-vision (al-ru´yä) is from God, and the dream (al-hulm) from the Devil” (Bukhärï 1979, no. 6567). According to E. W. Lane (1978, 632) most lexicologists viewed the terms hulm and ru´yä as synonyms. 16. E.g., Bukhärï (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´yä, 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 manäm (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 unification 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

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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 “paper doubt,” Ian 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. In a footnote Freud subsumed “dream-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 assumptions 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 1920s (cf. Tedlock 1987). 25. Some scholars have claimed that al-Ghazälï’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-Färäbï (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).

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28. I am 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 (1990) 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 (1981) 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 for 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-

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tion dialogically. Through the shaykhs I 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, I 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 frames the dream-telling as private or semipublic), language used (including alternations between classical and colloquial Arabic), body language, setting, and presence of other listeners.

Chapter 1 1. Literally, mahdï means “rightly guided one.” Neither the Qur´an nor all canonical hadith works make mention of the mahdï, but the figure looms large in Sunni religious imaginations and is an essential part of Shi`ite 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 mahdï is expected to appear. 2. I 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 historical perspectives on “anti-Sufi” 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 Ru´a, Shaykh Hanafi 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-Gumhüriyya, 27 February 2003, p. 7; Al-Khamïs, 20 March 2003, p. 10. 6. Akhbär al-Yawm, 1 March 2003, p. 23. 7. Al-Gumhüriyya, 27 February 2003, p. 7; Sawt al-Azhar, 7 March 2003, p. 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. 9. There are four classical Sunni schools of law (madhhab, pl. madhähib): the Hanafi school, founded by Abü Hanïfa (d. 767); the Maliki school, founded

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by Mälik ibn Anas (d. 795); the Shafi`i school, founded by al-Shäfi`ï (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 Shafi`i schools are dominant, whereas Upper Egypt is predominantly Maliki. 10. Egyptian sociologist Sayyid `Uways (1965) studied letters that had been sent to al-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï’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. 11. The term barzakh appears in two other places in the Qur´an: “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 Manäl Wahïd in 2000. A housewife and member of the Bayyümï Sufi order, Shaykha Manäl 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 Manäl 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 unfit for the pilgrimage to Mecca could perform an “inner pilgrimage (hijja bätiniyya)” instead. Shaykha Manäl was sentenced to five years in prison with hard labor for inciting fitna, social unrest. For details on this case, see al-Ahräm, 19 July 2000, p. 27; al-Madïna al-Munawwara, 2 June 2000, p. 11; `Aqïdatï, 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. `Aqïdatï, 4 June 2002, p. 12. 14. Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1976). 15. Zär 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 zär among upper-class Egyptians. Whereas in the zär 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).

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16. For commentaries on the report, see `Aqïdatï, 22 July 2003, p. 9; Hadïth alMadïna, 29 October 2002, p. 2; al-Bayyän al-Imärätiyya, 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. 18. Jarïdat al-Watn al-`Arabï, 25 March 2003, p. 6. 19. Al-Ahräm, 10 February 2003, p. 10. 20. Hadïth al-Madïna, 29 October 2002, p. 2. 21. Al-Bayän al-Imärätiyya, 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 kähin, the diviner priest, and Muslim scholars have long insisted on a 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 (ahl al-ilhäd), and the philosopher Ibn Sïnä 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 Warfare 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 = option1. 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 Ridä’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. `A lï 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-

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sons why visions and dreams should never figure in a legal ruling: (1) 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. `Aqïdatï, 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-Riyäd, 14 August 2002, p. 2; and al-Bayyän al-Imärätiyya, 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-Bayän al-Imärätiyya, 29 August 2003, p. 7. 33. The dream interpreter referred explicitly to the hadith works by alBukhärï, al-Muslim, al-Tirmidhï, al-Bayhaqï, and Abü Däwüd: dream show Ahlam on channel al-Mihwär, 5 June 2003. 34. Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 18 March 2003, p. 14. 35. `Ammän, 20 June 2002, p. 23. 36. Al-Sharq 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 mahdï. 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, Juhaimän al-`Utaibï, 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 Sïrïn’s family background. According to him, Ibn Sïrïn’s father was Hassän Ibn Thäbit (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 Sïrïn.” 3. Ibn Sïrïn 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 Sïrïn include Ta`bïr al-Ru´yä and Muntakhab al-Kaläm fï Ta`bïr al-Ahlam, a compilation made at the beginning of the fifteenth century and reprinted in the margins of `Abd al-Ghanï al-Näbulusï’s widely used dream manual Ta`tïr al-Anäm fï Ta`bïr

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al-Manäm. Other works ascribed to Ibn Sïrïn are Tafsïr al-Ahlam, al-Lu´lu´ fï Ta`bïr al-Manäm, al-Tanwïr fï Ru´yat al-Ta`bïr, and al-Jawämi`. Ibn Sïrïn’s name is also evoked as the author of treatises on dreams written in Turkish, Persian, Greek, and Latin. See EI, “Ibn Sïrïn.” 4. Annemarie Schimmel refers to the shrine and its guardian in Die Träume des Kalifen (1998, 21). 5. A different, 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 (1994) and Hirschkind (2006) on preachers and sermons in Egypt, Eickelman (1979) on the qädï, Gilsenan (1973, 1983) on Sufi shaykhs, Cornell (1998) and Ewing (1997) on saints, and Keddie (1972) and Siegel (2000) on the `ulamä´. 7. Tafsïr historically also referred to commentaries on other texts, such as Aristotle’s writings or the Bible. Within the Islamic curriculum, Qur´anic tafsïr developed into a central part of Islamic education, along with the hadith and fiqh sciences. See EI, “tafsïr.” 8. According to a hadith, the Prophet dreamed of people wearing shirts and of `Umar ibn al-Khattäb’s shirt dragging on the ground behind him. The Prophet interpreted the shirt to symbolize religion (Bukhärï 1979, no. 7008). 9. Arabic words derive from a root that usually consists of three consonants. Ishtiqäq 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 (al-´aräfa 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-Imäm al-Husayn’s daughter, and her mosque was built over an apocryphal tomb by Muhammad `A lï’s family in the late nineteenth century. Al-Sayyida Ruqayya was the daughter of `A lï, the fourth caliph and the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fätima. She is buried in Damascus, but a shrine was built for her in Cairo under the Fatimid caliph al-Amïr in 1133. Along with al-Sayyida Nafïsa and al-Sayyida Zaynab, she is considered a central patron saint of the city. The monuments for al-Sayyida `Atïqa and Muhammad al-Ja`farï 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`far al-Sädiq, the sixth Shi´ite imam. 12. I thank Alejandra Gonzalez Jimenez for helping me articulate this difference. 13. This division is not absolute. Sometimes men also sit inside the shrine,

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and (less frequently) women on the street. Since I was generally inside the shrine, I 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 `Aqïdatï, 4 June 2002, p. 12. 16. This is the version of the hadith that I 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 Awläd `A lï (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 Alläh), and I don’t take money for it because I request the recompense (al-ajr) from God alone”; `Aqïdatï, 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 (i.e., 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

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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. I 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 firäsa refers to the skill of physiognomy, the unraveling of hidden inner states through outer signs. According to a hadith, the Prophet warns of the “firäsa of the believer because he sees with God’s light.” Shaykh Mustafa described firäsa as an almost prophetic knowledge, a sudden flash of certainty that erupts in one’s heart concerning another’s inner state. Whereas firäsa involves a looking at that is simultaneously an X-ray-like looking through, ilhäm is divinely inspired insight that is entirely divorced from the gaze. 8. Some of the titles of Nietzsche’s works, such as Morgenröte (Daybreak) and Götzen-Dämmerung (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). 9. Translated by Muhammad Asad as “Art thou not aware . . . ”—e.g., Qur´an 14:24, 13:31, 24:43. 10. A hadïth qudsï 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. Ibn al-`Arabï claimed that its authenticity has been proved not by transmission (naql) 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

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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 (aqwä) 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 (ru´yä 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. I 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 `A lï Gum`a does not simply equate fantasy and imagination. He devotes several pages of his book to a discussion of the concept of al-khayäl in Sufi writings, referring explicitly to Ibn al-`Arabï and noting that according to Sufi literatures, the revelation began in form of al-khayäl. 14. E.g., Qur´an 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 (khayäl ´albï).” According to Shaykh Qusi, it is not the heart (qalb) that sees but fu´äd, 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)`ilm al-yaqïn or the stage of muräqaba, which involves serving God as if one were able to see Him; (2) `ayn al-yaqïn, the stage of mushähada, which involves seeing God with the heart’s eye and seeing Him in the whole universe; and (3) haqq al-yaqïn, which refers to full immersion. 16. The Qur´an (17:85) states (in Ahmed Ali’s translation): “They ask you about [the rüh]. Say, [the rüh] 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 Qur´an. 17. Ahmed Ali’s translation. 18. Ibn al-Qayyim states in his fourteenth-century Kitäb al-Rüh (Book of the Spirit) that nafs and rüh are different only in characteristics (sifät), not in essence (dhät). By contrast, one Qur´anic healer suggested to me that the nafs (self) is on the right side of the body, parallel to the heart, while the rüh (spirit) is with the mind. Many Sufis say that the spirit is divine whereas

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the self is earthly and material (turäbiyya wa mäddiyya). Dream-visions are often associated with the rüh 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 Qur´an (17:1, 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, I also highlight its limitations in this chapter. 21. The practice of istikhära 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 `A lï Gum`a holds that istikhära 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, I am near; I respond to the call of him who calls, whenever he calls unto Me” (2:186). 23. The Qur´an refers to God’s “Beautiful Names” (e.g., 17:110; 20:8; 59:24). Classical scholars who have written on these names include al-Ghazälï, alQushayrï, and al-Bayhaqï. The names that are included on the list vary. 24. Quoted in Graham (1977, 173). In Ibn al-`Arabï’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 hadd biyshüf); only those with strong faith (ïmän) are able to perceive the Virgin, whereas those who have closed (´äfil) 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 Qur´anic verses to actually speaking Arabic. The story is transmitted by al-

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Husayn Ibn Mahräa and retold by Shaykh Mahmüd al-Hanafï in his article “Tafsïr al-Ru´ä” (The Interpretation of Dream-Visions), al-Yaqaza 1811 (12–18 November 2003):113. 28. A historical precedent to such a problematization of causality can be found in al-Ghazälï, 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 Incoherence, 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 (2001). 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. I 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-Dunyä. Subsequently they appeared in book form in Arabic, French, and English (2005). In 1982 Mahfouz had already published a collection of short stories titled Ra´aytu fïmä yarä al-nä´im (I Saw as the Sleeper Sees), one of which includes a series of seventeen numbered dreams. I was told that in 2001 or 2002 a Ramadan TV series was based on Mahfouz’s dreams. 7. In his 1982 Nobel Prize lecture, Gabriel García Márquez 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

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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. 9. The Qur´anic verse “Now there has come unto you from God a light, and a clear divine writ” (5:15) has been interpreted by classical exegetes, such as al-Suyütï and al-Tabarï, 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). 10. Shaykh Qusi’s case also differs from that of a shaykh who was inspired by a vision to found a Shädhiliyya order in Egypt during the 1920s, but whose authority was established through miracles and not through confirmatory visions (Gilsenan 1973, 20–35). 11. This definition resembles those found in classical sources. Rasül (messenger) refers to those sent as the head of an umma, a community, whereas nabï (prophet) refers to someone who is sent to warn the believers. Both terms are used in the Qur´an to refer to Muhammad. The term rasül in the Qur´an also refers to Nüh (the biblical Noah), Lüt (Lot), Ismä`ïl (Ishmael), Müsä (Moses), Shu`ayb, Hüd, Sälih, and `Ïsä (Jesus). The term nabï is used more widely, encompassing the majority of the apostles as well as biblical or quasibiblical characters like Ibrähïm (Abraham), Ishäq (Isaac), Yaqüb (Jacob), Härün, Däwüd (David), Sulaymän (Solomon), Ayyüb (Job), and Dhu al-Nün. See EI, “Rasül.” 12. I 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 reconfigure, the present—just like a prophetic dream. 13. Qur´an 86:13–14, Ahmed Ali’s translation. Muhammad Asad’s translation of the same verse reads, “Behold, this [divine writ] is indeed a word that cuts between truth and falsehood/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., Bukhärï 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

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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 Qur´an 75:16ff.

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 Hoffman (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 refuge with Allah from its evil, and he should not mention it to anybody, for it will not harm him” (Bukhärï 1979, no. 6985). 6. To regain the state of purity for prayer, Muslims perform either a simple procedure of ablution (wudü´) 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 Sïrïn, 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 fï 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 Ibn Sïrïn, 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).

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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 Nakïr, 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). 11. Leah Kinberg (2000, 48) offers this interpretation in an article that discusses six such narratives, mostly taken from Kitäb al-Manäm by Ibn Abï al-Dunyä (d. 894). Cf. 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, I would have liked also to ask the woman what made 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. I am grateful to Samuli Schielke for pointing out to me that a conflicting dream-story circulates with regards to Shaykh Mutawallï al-Sha`räwï’s shrine. Supposedly, the deceased shaykh appeared in a dream to his son Hagg `Abd al-Rahïm, 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`räwï was turned into a saint, see Iskander (2001). 16. Egypt today is primarily Sunni, and Shi`ites are a minority (though their numbers have been rising thanks to the influx of Iraqi refugees). Between 909 and 1171, Egypt was ruled by the Fatimids, a Shi`ite dynasty. Al-Azhar (originally built as a Shi`ite educational center but today the key representative of Sunni Islam) recognizes Shi`ism as a legitimate branch of Islam, yet “Islamist” thinkers like Yüsuf al-Qardäwï 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., Bukhärï (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

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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 (literally, “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 Imäm 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” (Halwänï 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. 19. 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 tarïqa 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 Sufis 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 Sufism (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 Hoffman-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 I mean the epistemological field that creates (and delimits) the conditions of the possibility of knowledge (Foucault 1970, xxii). Unlike

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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`räwï 1998). 2. In Arabic the titles are Al-Ahläm wa-l-Kawäbïs: Tafsïr `Ilmï wa Dïnï, Al-Ahläm bayna al-`Ilm wa-l-`Aqïda, and Usus wa Usül fï Tafsïr al-Ahläm bayna Früyid wa Ulamä´ al-Muslimïn. 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 Fï Tahlïl al-Nafs (On Psychoanalysis). Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain a copy. 6. I spell the psychologists’ names according to how they appear in the literature. 7. On Safouan’s use of psychoanalysis as a tool for political critique, see Pandolfo (2009). 8. I merely 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). 9. 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 (Maróth 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 zär rituals, and psychiatrist Yahyä al-Rakhäwï has allegedly developed an Egyptian

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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). 12. See EI, “ `Ilm.” 13. It was a psychologist at `A ïn Shams University who claimed that Freud was one of the founders of the state of Israel. Such comments have to be understood 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. I found negative portrayals of Freud’s background as a Jewish thinker also in contemporary editions of Ibn Sïrïn’s work (e.g., Khattäb 1997, 14) and in newspaper articles with titles such as “Is Psychoanalysis a Jewish Science?” (Sh`alän 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 I 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-amära (the commanding self) is controlled by passion and impulses; it commands evil (e.g., 12:53); al-nafs al-lawäma (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 Mahmüd (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-`Ilm wa-l-Imän (Science and Faith; cf. Salvatore 2000). 16. When the first book on psychology appeared in Egypt in 1895, the Arabic term al-sarïra (secret thought) was used to refer to the unconscious. In psychological literatures the term was then replaced by al-`aql al-bätin (inner mind) and subsequently by al-lä shu`ür (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-lä wa`y (unconsciousness) or al-`aql al-bätin. 17. `Aqïdatï, 4 June 2002, p. 12. 18. I borrowed video recordings of the program from Shaykh Hanafi. 19. Video-recording of Allähumma 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

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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. I use the term media age not because I subscribe to a technological determinism 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 differs 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. I assume the shaykh receives money from the Web site but am not certain. 8. An example is the Egyptian movie Ma`alï al-Wazïr (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. 9. 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 (bukhür), and a 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.

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10. I 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). 11. 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, I think of these imaginaries as intertwined with law and politics, not outside them. 12. Rüz al-Yüsuf, 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).

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3. Shaykh al-Sabähï 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 sharï`a law as the main source of legislation. In 2003, the party had fewer than two hundred members. 4. See, e.g., Rüz al-Yüsuf, 4 November 2005, pp. 46f. 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.

Glossary

ahl al-bayt

awliyä´

baraka

barzakh

basar basïra al-bätin bid`a

da`wa

“People of the household”; refers to the Prophet Muhammad’s family and descendants, many of whom are buried and venerated in Cairo. Literally, the “friends of God,” those close to God, favored (sing. walï) by God, frequently translated as “saints.” Blessing, spiritual power, divine grace, or sanctity associated with individuals, places, or objects; can be transferred through contact or gaze. 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. Optical gaze. Inner vision, ability to perceive hidden truths. The hidden secret; inner realities; the opposite of al-zähir. Unwarranted innovations; beliefs or practices for which there is no precedent and which are therefore best avoided. “Call, invitation”; in present-day Egypt mostly refers to proselytizing activities that call Muslims back to their religion.

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Glossary

dervish (darwïsh in Arabic) dhikr

al-Fätiha

firäsa

al-ghayb

hadith (hadïth in Arabic)

hadïth nafsï

hadïth qudsï

hadra hulm (hilm in Egypt)

ilhäm imam (imäm) inshäd istikhära

Someone living an ascetic life, often close to the saint shrines. 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. The opening sura of the Qur´an, recited during each prayer and when visiting saint shrines or cemeteries. Intuition; can involve physiognomy or divinely inspired insight into other’s people’s inner states. The unseen or unknown; Divine mystery that is inaccessible to humans but glimpses of which might be known through dream- and waking visions. Literally, “speech”; authoritative records of 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. A category of dreams; literally, “talk of the self,” a dream that reflects the dreamer’s wishes and worries. God’s words as told to the Prophet Muhammad but not included in the Qur´an. Their authenticity is often questioned. Literally, “presence,” a Sufi congregation for performing dhikr. A category of dreams inspired by the devil or evil spirits; in everyday language sometimes refers to all kinds of dreams, including dream-visions. Divine inspiration. In the Sunni context, prayer leader or leader of a mosque and its community. A musical recitation of religious poetry, often performed at saint’s day celebrations. Literally, “seeking the best”; a nonobligatory prayer through which God’s help is requested

Glossary

jinn

al-khayäl

mahdï

al-mahkama al-bätiniyya

mä´idat al-Rahmän

mashhad ru´yä

mawlid

nafs niqäb

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267

when one is facing a difficult decision. The answer often comes in the form of a dreamvision. 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 made of clay, and angels, of light. 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). “The rightly guided one.” Within a Sunni eschatological context, the mahdï is a savior who will restore true Islam at a time of decadence and decay immediately preceding Judgment Day. “Hidden court”; a court composed of saints (particularly Sayyida Zaynab, al-Imäm alHusayn, and al-Imäm al-Shäfi`ï) that decides matters affecting the world of the living; it often makes its verdicts known by way of dream-visions. “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 from home. “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. “Saint’s day” commemorating the birth or death of a saint, usually celebrated at his or her shrine; the commemoration can last from one night to two weeks. The ego, self. Sufi discipline in part aims at purifying the nafs. 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.

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rüh

ru´ya ru´yä

Salafism

sharï`a

shaykh

Sïdï sunna

Wahhabism

wahm

al-zähir zär

Glossary “Spirit.” According to the Qur´an, we know very little about the rüh. 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. Optical sight. 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. 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-sälih)” while rejecting many aspects of “popular” religion. 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.” 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. Generally refers to a living saint or a particularly revered shaykh; usually a form of address. Traditions established by the words and actions of the Prophet; a model of behavior that pious Muslims seek to emulate. A Sunni, literalist reform movement, named after Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Wahhäb (d. 1792); the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Fantasy, fancy; as opposed to al-khayäl, which, according to some, is a metaphysical realm and faculty of the imagination. The outward, external, visible reality. 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 Abü Bakr, 44, 59, 66 adghäth ahläm (confused/false dreams), 166, 189, 243n15 afterlife, 4, 36, 148–53, 166, 220–21, 234, 258n17. See also barzakh; dead, the; death agency, 4, 5, 99, 103–4, 108, 142, 242n12, 251n1 Althusser, Louis, 252n4 angels: dream-, 190, 223, 226; dreams of, 60, 169; evocative power of, 169; hadra and, 101; gaining knowledge from, 258n10; as (in)visible, 84–85, 88–90, 109, 236–37, 239; sightings of, 223, 236–37, 263n13 anthropological dream studies, 10–13, 163, 244nn22–24 anthropology of the imagination, 15, 16–20, 29–30, 238–39 Apolito, Paolo, 221–23, 229 `aql (mind/reason). See mind/reason (`aql) al-`aql bätin (inner mind), 45, 188–89, 261n16, 265 Arabic language, 41, 61, 250n9 “Arab mind,” the, 22, 34, 40–41, 232, 248n24 Arendt, Hannah, 4, 171, 237, 238

Ariès, Philippe, 146, 149 Aristotle, 7, 13, 16, 41, 141, 244n21, 244n26 Artemidorus, 59, 141 Asad, Talal, 43, 104, 140, 183–84, 241n4, 242n12 astrology, 41, 57, 248n23 auditory experiences, 93, 101, 123, 125, 136, 227 authority of interpretation: apparitions and, 218–19; disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 111, 121; dreamers and, 108–9, 111, 219; Egyptian psychologists and, 192–95, 197–98; initiation story as support for, 70–71; mass mediation and, 225, 229–30; Shaykh Qusi as, 111, 120, 121, 123, 125–26, 128, 139, 256n10 authorship: Book of Visions and, 27, 118–20, 124, 126–27, 131–34, 138; creativity and, 117; the dead and, 121; dream texts and, 27, 209–10; imagination and, 115, 118, 239; poetry and, 115, 118, 120–21, 128– 29. See also poetry autonomous self, 2–5, 14, 19, 103, 163, 237–38, 241n5 awakening, 35, 49–51, 204, 236, 239 awliyä´ (saints). See saints (awliyä´)

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Azhar, al-: history of, 33, 43, 248n28, 258n16; interpretation of dreams and, 25–26, 32–34, 51, 52–53, 58, 69, 194; mosque/university of, 65–66, 72, 98, 162, 164; as official institutional voice of Sunni Islam, 25, 33, 116, 246n4; Shaykh Hanafi and, 25, 48, 78, 194–95, 233; Shaykh Mustafa and, 26; Shaykh Qusi and, 116–17. See also Salafism; Sunni Islam Badr, Battle of, 263n13 Bakhtin, M. M., 8, 197, 243n18 Bannä, Hasan al-, 44–45 baraka: in Coptic contexts, 158, 218– 20; description of, 265; gaze and, 88; of Ibn Sïrïn, 71, 215; mass mediation and, 218–19; Ramadan and, 85, 90– 91; of saints, 220; of shaykhs, 116; of shrines, 71, 156, 215; transfer of, 109; vision-sites and, 161 Barthes, Roland, 120–21, 132 barzakh: afterlife and, 4, 36, 166, 220– 21, 234, 258n17; conversations in, 148–50, 157; description of, 3, 242n9, 247n11, 265; either/or space versus, 3, 239; erasures of, 35–41; imagination and access to, 89; inner vision and, 85, 89, 90–91, 109; interpretation of dreams in space of, 70, 148– 50, 199; mass media and, 230–31; the Prophet Muhammad in, 95; Qur´an on, 37, 247n11; reformist thinkers on, 7, 37; saints and, 157; spirit and, 94–95; vision sites and, 161. See also afterlife; dead, the; death; in-betweenness basar (optical gaze/vision). See optical gaze/vision (basar) basïra (inner vision/sight). See inner vision/sight (basïra) bätin (invisible/inner reality). See invisible/inner reality (bätin) being in the world, 3–4, 7, 171, 233, 237–38 being-with, 3, 5, 154, 171, 238–39 Benedict XVI, 41

Benjamin, Walter, xiii, 51, 90, 218, 223, 232, 236, 255n5 Blanchot, Maurice, 84, 89–90 body: beyond boundaries of, 84, 89, 94–95; burial of saints and preservation of, 160, 258n14; inviting dreams and, 98–102, 254n20; invocation/remembrance of God and, 100; spirit versus, 10–11, 13, 88, 93–95, 236, 244n21, 244n25 Book of Visions, 27, 118–20, 124, 126– 27, 131–34, 138, 201, 256n12 (re)burial, and building of shrines, 160–61, 170, 237 Burroughs, William, 31, 54, 235 Butler, Judith, 5, 171, 238, 241n4 call(ing), and dreams, 50–51, 67–71, 107–9 call/invitation [to Islam] (da`wa), 48, 50–51, 265 causality paradox, 103–4, 110, 253n28, 254n25 Certeau, Michel de, 86, 191 charlatans, discourses about, 38– 40, 52, 181–84, 195–96, 248n23, 260–61n11 Christianity: Catholicism, 221–23, 229–30; evangelical, 259n20; and Greek philosophy, 41; medieval, 259n20. See also Coptic Christianity; Marian apparitions City of the Dead, 35, 64, 112, 154–55, 250n10 classification of dreams: Freudian versus Islamic, 184–86, 194; Qur´an on, 6, 77; Shaykh Nabil on, 76–77. See also dreams that originate within the self (hadïth nafsï); dream-vision (ru´yä); devil-sent dreams (hulm) collective dreams and visions, 3, 84, 125–26, 223, 236–37, 263n13 colonialism, 7, 40–41, 43, 50, 175, 232 commodification of dreams, 8, 218 communal practices and responsibilities, 29, 100–102, 104, 141, 143, 159 communities, imagined, 5, 16, 229–30

Index community, material support for and from, 80–82, 84, 158–59, 215, 262n7 confirmation of divinely inspired poetry, 111, 120–21, 123, 125–26, 128, 131–32, 138–39, 256n10 confused/false dreams (adghäth ahläm), 166, 189, 243n15 Connolly, William E., 242n10, 250n5, 263n1 context, and temporality, 77, 90–91, 235–36 conversions, 158, 220–21, 237, 257n4 Coptic Christianity, 157–58, 243n17, 243–44n19, 252n6, 258n12. See also Marian apparitions court of hidden saints (mahkama bätiniyya), 35, 67, 247n10, 267 Crapanzano, Vincent, 3–4, 12, 15, 76, 142 creativity, 17, 117–18, 128, 137, 255nn5–6, 255–56n7 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 40–41 cyber interpretations: dreamers and, 212–14; as expanding and narrowing interpretation of dreams, 211– 13, 216; interpreter of dreams and, 214–16; professional identity of dream interpreter and, 208–9, 216; Shaykh Nabil and, 27, 56, 187, 204, 208–9, 211–12; sleep and wakefulness line in, 213. See also Internet Web sites da`wa (call/invitation [to Islam]), 48, 50–51, 108, 265 dead, the: authorship and, 121; City of the Dead, 35, 64, 112, 154–55, 250n10; desires of, 151–52; dreams of, 144–48, 151–53, 192–93, 257nn7– 9; feelings in presence of, 64–65; Freud on dreams of, 146–48; line between living and, 64; spiritualsocial relations with, 3, 121; states of, 152; tombs of, 145, 145, 149; TV and spirits of, 226; vision-asencounter with, 120–24; wish fulfillment and dreams of, 146–48;

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writing and relationship with, 120– 21. See also barzakh; saints (awliyä´); visitational dreams; visitation cycles with saints (awliyä´) death: afterlife and, 4, 36, 166, 220 – 21, 234, 258n17; awakening and, 35, 239; conversations beyond, 148–49; dreams foreshadowing, 150, 239, 257n9; space of, 4, 64–65, 148–50, 234, 242n11; Freud on, 148; Shaykh Qusi’s disciples, tombs and, 149, 201, 264n5; spirit and, 149–50, 151; writing and relationship with, 120–21. See also afterlife; barzakh; dead, the Deleuze, Gilles, 226, 263n15 democratization of dream interpretation, 209–12 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 143 dervishes (daräwïsh), 38, 67, 70, 167, 207, 220, 253n14 Descartes, René, 10–11, 13, 88, 236, 244n21, 244n25 desire, 7, 12, 27, 87, 102, 103, 151–52, 161, 182, 186, 190, 195–98, 235 devil-sent dreams (hulm): as category of dreams, 6; dream-vision versus, 6, 243n15; hadith literature on, 74, 76–77, 184–85, 214, 243n15, 257n5, 266; performative power of, 143, 162, 257n5; psychological explanations for, 185; Ru´ä and, 193; rules of conduct for the sleeper and, 99, 143, 257n6 dhikr (invocation/remembrance of God), 21, 100–102, 207, 254n23. See also hadra DiCenso, James, 200 dihlïz (threshold), 57–58, 59, 66, 79, 82 disciples of Shaykh Qusi: authority of interpretation and, 111, 121; Book of Visions, 27, 118–20, 124, 126–27, 131–34, 138, 201, 256n12; confirmation of vision-as-encounter through, 121, 125–26, 128, 138–39; hadra and, 24–25, 101, 206–7; Internet Web site of, 117, 201, 206–8, 239, 262n3; mass mediation and, 117,

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disciples of Shaykh Qusi (continued) 206–8, 216; mawlids and, 24; Prophet-visions and, 127–28; in Saudi Arabia, 24; tomb for, 149, 201; virtual realities and, 201, 205 disciplining of dreams: arrest of Shaykha Manäl and, 247n12; erasures of barzakh and, 35–41; by interpreter of dreams, 8, 53; Muslim Brotherhood and, 44–46; Orientalism and, 40–41, 137–38, 232; overview, 31–35; political dimensions and, 52. See also Egyptian state; reformist thinkers “discourse, incitement to,” 33, 246n2 Divine, the. See God divine inspiration (ilhäm): Book of Visions as illumination of, 120; description of, 89, 252n7, 266; dreamvision and, 13, 135–36; imagination as, 49; initiation and, 67–71; interpretation of dreams and, 58, 60, 67–71, 69; intuition versus, 252n7; poetry and, 128–33; Qur´an and, 130–31; reformist thinkers on, 42– 43, 45, 49, 130; saints as source of, 70; Shaykh Qusi on, 19; learning versus, 70. See also vision-as-prophecy double directionality, 19, 78–79, 109–10 doubt, dream, 10, 13, 165–66, 244n21, 244n25 dream-angels, 190, 223, 226 dream effects: conversions and, 158, 237, 257n4; creativity and, 117–18, 137, 255nn5–6, 255–56n7; description of, 142; evocative power and, 107–9, 124, 138, 142, 146, 169–70, 235, 238; food distribution and, 81, 151, 158–59, 170–72; healing and, 142, 158, 182; knowledge gained and, 144–46, 151–53, 168, 258n10; mashähid ru´yä (vision sites) and, 161; (re)burial and building of shrines and, 160–61, 170; visitation cycles with saints and, 158–61, 170. See also evocative power dreamers: authority of interpretation

and, 108–9, 111, 219; cyber interpretations and, 212–14; day-dreamers, 117; gender of, 23, 66, 125, 126, 163, 250–51n13; interpreter of dreams, and interactions with, 61–63, 74–76, 78, 79, 215–17; mediation and, 82– 83, 107, 111, 121; rules of conduct for the sleeper and, 96, 98–100, 99, 143, 254n22, 257n6; vision-asprophecy and, 3, 8, 49, 96, 99, 108 dreams: history, and role of, 232, 236; marginalization of, 7–8, 10, 31, 44, 235, 244n20; use of term, 6. See also classification of dreams; dream effects; dream-vision (ru´yä); interpretation of dreams; interpreter of dreams dreams that originate within the self (hadïth nafsï), 6, 76–77, 183–85, 188–89, 266 dream-vision (ru´yä): as category of dreams, 6, 76; contradictory effects of, 111; court of hidden saints and verdicts delivered in, 67, 267; description of, 6–7, 76–77, 143, 243n15; divine inspiration and, 135–36; double directionality of, 109–10; dreams versus, 82, 185; Elsewhere and, 29, 81, 96, 97, 103, 110–11, 115; ethical dimensions of, 77–78, 141– 43, 160–61, 171–72, 233–39, 234, 257n2; etymology of ru´yä, 91; al-ghayb as accessed through, 104, 173, 237; hadith literature on, 115, 256–57n14; Ibn al-`Arabï and, 7, 44; imaginary and attunedness through, 89; inner vision/sight and, 189; Internet Web sites and effects on, 8, 216, 227, 229, 233; as legal evidence, 45–47, 248–49n29; prophecy and, 6, 109–10, 135–36; the Prophet Muhammad on, 6, 128; Prophet-visions and, 102, 122, 164–70, 258n17; psychological terms integrated in understanding of, 77; revelation versus, 34, 133–36, 256–57n14; Salafi thinkers on, 130; screens and, 228–29;

Index self-cultivation for, 5, 86, 97, 102–3, 109–10; Shaykh Hanafi on, 76; Shaykh Nabil on, 76–77, 82; sleep and wakefulness line and, 6, 243n17; spirit and, 93, 99, 189; visitation cycles with saints and, 156–57. See also imaginary; imagination; imagination/khayäl; in-betweenness; inner vision/sight (basïra); interpretation of dreams; interpreter of dreams; inviting dream-visions; narrated dream-vision; preparedness versus production of dreamvision; visitational dreams; specific shaykhs dual temporality, 126–28 Egyptian psychologists: authority of interpretation and, 192–95, 197–98; discourses on charlatans among, 52, 181–84, 260–61n11; frictions between, 179–81; genealogy of, 175–77; hallucinatory wish fulfillment and, 172, 198; marginalization of, 180–82; publications and translations by, 176–79, 260n5; on Ru´ä, 32, 33–34, 191–95; scientific dream model and, 183; statistics, 260nn8–9; university departments of, 175–76, 180–81 Egyptian state: emergency laws and, 1, 241n2; Internet Web sites control by, 262n2; interpretation of dreams regulation by, 32–33, 37, 38, 53, 247n12; mass media regulation by, 262n2; religion regulation by, 33, 37–38, 246n3, 247n12; on searches into al-ghayb, 32–33; socio-moral crisis and, 1–2; Sufism regulation by, 33; television program regulation by, 32–33, 37; “true Islam” ideological contest and, 28–29, 33, 38, 40, 52 either/or space: barzakh versus, 3; Freud model in Egypt and, 185; imaginary versus, 18, 29, 52, 89, 239; interpretation of dreams and, 173–74, 182, 185–90, 261n13

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Elmessiri, Abdelwahhab, 182 Elsewhere: dream-vision and, 29, 81, 96, 97, 103, 110–11, 115; ethics and, 3, 51, 141, 237; Freud model and tension with model of, 14, 237; inviting dream-visions and, 97; prophecy, and source in, 81, 106, 137; Qur´an and dream-vision as eruptions of knowledge from, 115; visitation cycles with saints and, 163 Enlightenment, 10–11, 13, 16, 88, 140–41, 244n21, 244n25 episteme, 172, 173–74, 191, 199, 216, 235, 237, 259–60n21 Eternal Tablet (lawh mahfüz), 131, 189–90, 201–5, 226, 230 ethical dimensions: as being-with, 154, 238–39; beyond self, 5, 231; communal practices/responsibilities and, 29, 141, 143; dream-vision and, 77– 78, 141–43, 160–61, 171–72, 233–39, 234, 257n2; Elsewhere and, 3, 51, 141, 237; fatwa against, 46; Freud on, 141–43, 257n2; of imaginary/ imagination, 3, 28, 56, 200, 231, 239; of in-betweenness, 53, 56–57, 200, 237, 250n5; interpretation of dreams and, 45–46, 77–79, 81–82, 171; Kantian versus Aristotelian, 140–41; morality versus, 143, 171; openings and, 56, 200, 239; prophecy and, 237; reformist thinkers on, 7, 44; Shaykh Nabil on, 152–53; visitational dreams and, 140–41, 152– 53, 171–72, 258n10; visitation cycles with saints and, 163–64; in Western history, 141–42, 257n2 evil spirit-inspired dreams (hulm). See devil-sent dreams (hulm) evocative power: of Book of Visions, 138; devil-sent dreams and, 143, 162, 257n5; of dreams, 142, 146, 169–70, 235; of poetry, 124; Prophet-visions and, 166–67; visitational dreams and, 7, 142–44, 146–48, 151–52, 257n4. See also dream effects

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face-to-face interpretation of dreams, 56, 61–62, 71–74, 78, 98, 208, 211– 12, 214–15 fantasy (wahm): Freud model and, 16, 179; imagination/khayäl versus, 8, 19–20, 91–92, 179, 242n8, 253n13, 268; political dimensions of, 142; Qur´an on, 92; use of term, 3, 242n8 fatwa, 46, 214 fieldwork: description of, 20–28; dreams during, xv, 28, 75; dreams as invisible objects of, 21, 83, 86– 87, 251–52n3; interlocutors in, 22– 23, 38, 245n35, 245–46n36; writing dreams and, 21–22, 27–30, 132–33, 246n37; writing ethnography and, 27–28, 238, 256n12 films, 39, 209, 216, 224, 226–29, 230, 262n8, 263n15 firäsa (intuition). See intuition (firäsa) flooding of senses, 92–93, 204, 207 food distribution, 81, 84, 151, 158–59, 170–72 foreshadowing, dreams as, 150, 168, 236, 257n9 Foucault, Michel, 17–19, 77, 89–90, 120–21, 197, 238, 242n10, 245n33, 246n2 Freud, Sigmund: anti-Israeli sentiments and, 185, 261n13; apolitical interpretation of dreams and, 235; Arabic translation of writings by, 177–79, 178; against autonomous self, 14; on creative writing, 133; on daydreamers, 117; on the dead in dreams, 146–48; on death, 148; dreams that originate within the self and, 185; Egyptian responses to, 14, 146–48, 245n28; on ethics, 141–42, 257n2; hallucinatory wish fulfillment and, 141–42, 172, 173, 185, 190–91; Ibn Sïrïn compared with, 54; Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung), 146–48, 177–79, 178; on knowledge through dreams, 106–7; on Otherness, 200, 261–62n21; redreamed dreams and, 147; rele-

vance of, 199–200, 245n28; Shaykh Nabil on, 190–91; on sleep and wakefulness line, 11, 191; use of name, 14 Freud model in Egypt: Arabic translation of writings by Freud, 177–79, 178; description of Freud model and, 13–14, 18; dream versus dreamvision, and, 185; either/or space and, 185; Elsewhere and tension with, 14, 237; ethics and, 141–43, 257n2; hallucinatory wish fulfillment and, 174, 179; history and impact of, 29, 173–74, 175–81, 184, 187–91; imagination versus, 18, 179; responses to, 14, 146–48, 184, 245n28; as scientific, 183 Frishkopf, Michael, 121 García Márquez, Gabriel, 117, 255–56n7 gaze. See optical gaze/vision (basar) gaze, sincere. See inner vision/sight (basïra) gender: access to al-ghayb and, 82– 83, 104, 110; of dreamers, 23, 66, 125, 126, 163, 250–51n13; hadith literature on dreams and, 103; of interpreter of dreams, 63, 66, 126, 245–46n36; intuition and, 126; preparedness versus production of dream-vision and, 104; public sphere and, 162–63; reformist thinkers and, 162–63; rules of conduct for the sleeper and, 99; value of dreams and, 104; visitational dreams and, 162–63; visitors to Ibn Sïrïn shrine and, 66, 71, 73, 250–51n13 ghayb, al-: access to, 173; description of, 260n1, 266; dream-vision as access to, 104, 173, 237; Egyptian psychologists on, 187, 237; Egyptian state on searches into, 32–33; gender and access to, 82–83, 104, 110; as inaccessible, 47; the Prophet Muhammad and, 47; Qur´an on, 47,

Index 187, 260n1; Salafi views on, 47; statistics on searches into, 39; unconscious as access to, 187; Wahhabi views on, 47 Ghazälï, al-: on causality paradox, 255n28; on God’s Ninety-Nine Names, 254n23; influences of, 24, 44, 48, 183, 186, 244n25; on interpretation of dreams and Qur´an exegesis, 58; on masses’ readiness for religious truths, 207–8; on prophecy and sleep, 112; on sleep and wakefulness line, 13, 244n26; on states of the dead, 152; on threshold, 57; on vision-as-prophecy, 128 Gilsenan, Michael, 26, 27, 163, 256n10 God: double-directionality and, 78–79, 233; dreams of, 253n12; dream-vision and transformational encounters with, 82–83, 104, 110; egalitarian communication with, 82–83, 104, 110; invocation/remembrance of, 21, 100–102, 207, 254n23; language of, 131; material world and, 89, 91; mediation between human knowledge and, 57, 115; Ninety-Nine Names of, 100, 207, 209, 254n23; the Real, 228, 241n3; photographic evidence of, 220–24, 222, 229; preparedness/unpreparedness and encounters with, 103–4, 106, 110; as present in everyday life, 3, 5, 8, 36; visionary realities and, 223–24. See also ghayb, alGreek philosophy/literature: Aristotle, 7, 13, 16, 41, 141, 244n21, 244n26; Artemidorus, 59, 141; Christianity and harmony with, 41; interpretation of dreams and, 59, 77, 141; Plato, 16, 244n21; rationalism and, 246n8; sleep and wakefulness line and, 244; vision theories and, 87, 228; visitational dreams and, 170 habitus, 140–41, 254n20. See also technologies of the self Hacking, Ian, 82, 244n21, 245n29

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Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, 151–52, 156, 220, 258n10 hadith literature: on acting versus being acted upon, 103; authority of, 122, 165; Book of Visions and, 126–27; description of, 122, 127, 165; on devil-sent dreams, 74, 76– 77, 184–85, 214, 243n15, 266; on dream-visions, 115, 256–57n14; on gender and dreams, 103; interpretation of dreams and, 6, 48, 58–60, 242–43n13, 243n16; interpreter of dreams and, 48, 69; on the Prophet Muhammad, 165–66; on Prophetvisions, 165–66, 258n17; on rules of conduct for the sleeper, 98–99; symbols and, 60–61; telling of dreams and, 74, 251n16; temporality and, 126–27; as trope for understanding dream-visions, 115, 122–23, 127–28, 138; vision-as-encounter and, 115, 121–22, 126–27, 138; vision-as-prophecy and, 6, 136, 256–57n14. hadïth nafsï (dreams that originate within the self), 6, 76–77, 183–85, 188–89, 266 hadra: accessibility of, 205–8; angels and, 101; description of, 100–101, 202, 266; disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 24–25, 101, 206–7; invocation/ remembrance of God and, 100–102, 254n23; mass mediation and, 113, 205, 218–19; texts merging with visionary realities and, 101–2, 219; waking vision and, 101 hallucinatory wish fulfillment: the dead and, 146–48; desire and, 143, 172, 198, 235; dreams and, 143; Egyptian psychologists on, 172, 198; Freud model in Egypt and, 174, 179; Freud on, 141–42, 172, 173, 185, 190– 91; interpretation of dreams and, 174, 179, 190–91, 199; Shaykh Nabil on, 190–91; waking vision versus, 86–87, 191–98 Haraway, Donna, 89

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healing: dream effects and, 142, 158, 182; Qur´anic healers and, 39, 57, 168, 181, 184, 243n14, 247n15, 260– 61n11; Shaykh Nabil and, 79. See also zär rituals Hermansen, Marcia, 277 heteroglossia, 8, 186, 192, 195, 197–98, 199, 243n18 hidden secrets. See invisible/inner reality (bätin) hierarchy/hierarchies: dreams and, 82, 111, 170; Egyptian psychologists on linguistic, 176, 177; Prophet-visions and, 167–68; of senses, 253n11; visitational dreams and, 170. See also authority of interpretation Hirschkind, Charles, 4, 50, 224, 242n12 Hobbes, Thomas, 16, 19 hulm (devil-sent dream). See devilsent dreams (hulm) Ibn al-`Arabï: on divinely inspired poetry, 128; on double directionality, 19, 110; dream-vision and, 7, 44; on imagination, 19, 92, 128; on Prophetvisions, 127, 166 Ibn al-Färid, 129, 136, 166 Ibn Khaldün, 58, 103, 110 Ibn Shähïn, 60, 69, 210 Ibn Sïrïn, Muhammad: baraka of, 71; burial location for, 64; democratization of interpretation of dreams, and name of, 209–10; dream manual by, 32, 35–36, 48, 60; on dreams of the dead, 257n7, 257n9; face-to-face interpretation of dreams and, 62; Freud compared with, 54; initiation into interpretation of dreams for, 68; as interpreter of dreams, 54, 185, 249n1; intuition (firäsa) of, 62; Islamic model of dreams and, 6–10, 76–77, 115, 183–85, 188–89, 190, 242–43n13, 243nn14–15, 266; legacy of, 23–24, 54, 60, 249–50n2; life history of, 54, 64, 249n1; prophecy and, 54; on Prophet-visions, 166; as scientific model, 184; Shaykh

Nabil’s relation with, 54–57, 249n1; on symbols in interpretation of dreams, 36, 257nn7–9. See also Ibn Sïrïn shrine Ibn Sïrïn shrine: baraka of, 71, 215; caretaker of, 54–55, 65–66, 71–72; description of, 59, 64–66, 65; feelings in presence of the dead in, 64– 65; gender of visitors to, 66, 71, 73, 250–51n13; history and location of, 63–64, 68, 251n14; interpretation of dreams in, 74–76; material support for community and, 80–81, 82; as social nexus, 73, 82; threshold of, 57–58, 59, 66, 79, 82; visitor types in, 66, 72–74, 250–51n13. See also Ibn Sïrïn, Muhammad; Shaykh Nabil Ibn Taymiyya, 43, 161 ilhäm (divine inspiration). See divine inspiration (ilhäm) images: imagination versus, 17–19, 238; miraculous photographs and, 220– 24; power of, 197–99; recycled, 53, 147, 216–24, 220–24 imaginary: anthropology and, 15–16; dream-vision and attunedness to, 89; either/or space versus, 18, 29, 52, 89, 239; ethics of in-betweenness as open toward, 3, 56, 200, 239; interpreter of dreams and assistance from realm of, 68–69, 79, 82; political dimensions of, 3, 28, 30, 239; proof of, 44; the real versus, 7, 34–35, 51, 52, 109; Ru´ä and remapping of religious landscapes of the, 51–52; use of term, 3. See also dead, the; God; Prophet Muhammad, the; saints (awliyä´) imagination: anthropology of the, 15, 16–20, 29–30; authorship and, 115, 118, 239; being in the world and, 233; as divine inspiration, 49; ethics and, 3, 231; Freud model and, 18, 179; Ibn al-`Arabï on, 19, 92, 128; image versus, 17–19, 238; imagined communities and, 5, 16, 229–30;

Index mass mediation and, 230–31; political dimensions of, 3, 28, 237, 239; reimagining of, 233; in Romantic movement, 17, 187, 244n20; mahdï in religious, 31, 33, 34, 38, 50, 246n1, 249n38, 267; use of term, 3, 242n8; Western genealogy of, 16–18. See also imagination/khayäl imagination/khayäl: description of, 3, 18–19; ethics and, 28; fantasy and, 8, 19–20, 91–92, 179, 242n8, 253n13, 268; in-betweenness and, 233; marginalization of, 20; poetry and, 138, 179; socio-political-ethical-religious implications of, 28; as space, 18, 89, 225; use of term, 3; virtual realities compared with, 225; vision-asprophecy and, 23, 117. See also barzakh; imagination; Sufism Imäm al-Husayn, 24, 64, 66, 123, 154– 55, 161, 250n11, 267 Imäm al-Shäfi`ï, 20, 35–38, 247n10, 267 in-betweenness: ethics of, 53, 56–57, 200, 237, 239, 250n5; imagination and, 233; interpretation of dreams and, 173–74, 182–86, 190–91, 199; mass mediation and, 203; “taking/ making swim across” and, 54, 57, 69, 243, 249–50n3; threshold and, 57–58, 59, 66, 79, 82. See also barzakh; Ibn Sïrïn shrine; interpretation of dreams; interpreter of dreams; Shaykh Nabil “incitement to discourse,” 33, 246n2 initiation into interpretation of dreams, 67–71 inner mind (al-`aql bätin), 45, 188–89, 261n16, 265 inner vision/sight (basïra): barzakh and, 109; description of, 89–93, 252n8, 265; dream-vision and, 189; ecstatic poetry reading and, 114; interpreter of dreams and, 211; intuition and, 89, 252n7; nonocular understandings of, 85–86, 89–91, 109; optical gaze versus, 67, 85–86, 88, 89, 90–93; as flooding optical

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sight, 92–93; Qur´an on, 91–92, 252– 53n11, 253nn12–14; visible reality versus, 85, 87–89, 109, 252n4, 252n6; waking vision and, 89 inshäd (recitation), 112–14, 134–35, 266 Internet Web sites: disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 201, 206–8, 239, 262n3; dream-vision and effects of, 8, 216, 227, 229, 233; Egyptian state control over, 262n2; fatwa and, 46; Islam and, 2, 46, 85, 169–70, 207–8, 209; professional identity on, 208–9, 216; Shaykh Nabil and, 208–16; Wahhabism and, 46. See also cyber interpretations interpretation of dreams: awakening and, 49–51, 204; al-Azhar and, 25–26, 32–34, 51–53, 58, 69, 194; barzakh and, 70, 148–50, 199; cyber interpretations as expanding and narrowing, 211–13, 216; democratization of, 209–12; description of, 77–79, 81–82; divine inspiration and, 58, 60, 67–71, 69; dreams happen/come true during, 74, 81, 251n16; Egyptian state regulation of, 32–33, 37, 38, 53, 247n12; either/ or space and, 173–74, 182, 185–90, 261n13; Elsewhere as source for, 51, 106; ethics and, 45–46, 77–79, 81–82, 171; face-to-face, 56, 61–62, 71–74, 78, 98, 208, 211–12, 214–15; Greek literature and, 59, 77, 141; hadith literature and, 6, 48, 58–60, 242–43n13, 243n16; hallucinatory wish fulfillment and, 174, 179, 190– 91, 199; heteroglossias, and shaping of, 186, 192, 195, 197–98, 199; in Ibn Sïrïn shrine, 74–76; in-betweenness and, 173–74, 182–86, 190–91, 199; initiation into, 67–71; intuition and, 212; Islamic scholarship on, 33–34; “Islam” (re)made and, 29, 173–74, 184; as legitimate practice, 48–49; mahdï in, 31–32; mass mediation of, 53; materialist paradigm and, 14, 19, 45, 89, 182–83, 235; mediation and,

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interpretation of dreams (continued) 57, 81, 115; methods of, 60–62; mind/ reason and, 78; Otherness in, 200; political dimensions of, 47–51, 204; power relations and, 186, 191–95, 199; prophecy and, 47, 58, 68–69; psychological guidance and, 82; Qur´an and, 6, 8, 47, 48, 58, 61, 249n33, 250n8; rationality and, 31, 49; reshaping of, 8–9, 53, 243n18; Saudi Arabia and, 46–47, 195–98, 197, 249n31, 261n21; socio-moral society, and role of, 50–51; spiritual science and, 182–86, 199; as superstition, 38, 52, 162, 183–84; symbols in, 36, 78–79, 257nn7–9; on telephone, 73, 78, 204, 212; textual tradition and importance in, 60–61, 68–70, 209–211; unconscious resignified through, 29, 173–74, 184, 187–91; Wahhabi scholars on, 195–98, 261n20; Yüsuf as father of, 6, 58, 61, 68–70, 74, 104, 177. See also Egyptian psychologists; Freud model in Egypt; in-betweenness; mass mediation; television; waking vision (ru´yä) Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung; Freud), 146–48, 177–79, 178 interpreter of dreams: discourses about charlatans and, 38–39; cyber interpretations and, 214–16; disciplining of dreams by, 8, 53; dreamers and interactions with, 61–63, 74–76, 79, 215–17; dream manuals by, 35–36, 48, 60, 209; gender of, 63, 66, 126, 245–46n36; genealogy of, 58–60, 68; hadith literature and, 48, 69; Ibn Sïrïn as, 54, 185; imaginary, and assistance for, 68–69, 79, 82; inner vision and, 211; professional identity of, 69, 208–9, 216; psychology as modern versus, 7–8; public sphere and, 49–50; requirements for, 61–63, 81; as shaykhs, 63, 245– 46n36; Sunni Islam and, 70. See also

mediation; Shaykh Nabil; specific shaykhs interrelational dimensions, 2–4, 171, 233, 237, 241n5. See also communities, imagined; ethical dimensions intimate relationships: in evangelical and medieval Christianity, 259n20; with Prophet, 123, 168, 170, 259n20; with saints, 155–56 intuition (firäsa): description of, 89, 266; gender and, 126; Ibn Sïrïn and, 62; inner vision and, 89, 252n7; interpretation of dreams and, 212; Qur´an on, 252n7; reformist thinkers on, 136; Shaykh Nabil on, 212, 215; Shaykh Qusi on, 19, 149; Shaykh Sayyid on, 69, 212; telephone interpretation of dreams and, 212; written dreams and, 212 (in)visible, 84–91, 109, 204, 239 invisible/inner reality (bätin): court of hidden saints and, 35–38, 67, 247n10, 267; description of, 85–86, 265; electricity analogy and, 24; fieldwork, and dreams as, 21, 83, 86–87, 251–52n3; visible versus, 84– 85, 87, 265. See also court of hidden saints (mahkama bätiniyya) inviting dream-visions: Elsewhere and, 97; facilitation of dream-vision and, 95–96; invocation/remembrance of God and, 100–102, 104, 254n23; istikhära prayer and, 2, 95–98, 104, 196, 220, 254n20, 254n21; reformist thinkers on, 104; rules of conduct for the sleeper and, 96, 98–100, 254n22 invocation/remembrance of God (dhikr), 21, 100–102, 207, 254n23. See also hadra Iraq war, 1–2, 232, 233, 237 Islam: democratization of knowledge and, 207–8, 209; Egyptian state and regulation of, 33, 37–38, 247n12; Freud model in Egypt and, 181–82, 186; guidance from al-ghayb, and, 173; images in, 166, 218–20, 258– 59n18; Internet Web sites and, 2, 46,

Index 85, 169–70, 207–9; interpretation of dreams and (re)making of, 29, 173– 74, 184; Islamic model of dreams, 6–10, 76–77, 115, 183–85, 188–90, 242–43n13, 243nn14–15; legitimate scholars and, 48–49; mind/reason versus dreams/revelation and, 41– 44; textual tradition and, 8, 60–61, 68–70; “true Islam” contestations and, 23, 28–29, 33, 38–40, 49, 52; vision-as-encounter in tradition of, 115, 121–22. See also hadith literature; Islamic Revival; Qur´an; Sunni Islam Islamic Revival, 4, 5, 9, 45–46, 50, 181, 224, 234–35, 258n16 istikhära prayer, 2, 95–98, 104, 196, 220, 254nn21 jinn, 76, 78, 89, 99, 162, 209, 243n14, 267 jinn-inspired dreams. See devil-sent dreams (hulm) Joan of Arc, 42 Jonas, Hans, 87–88, 252n4 Jung, C. G., 13, 44, 74, 174, 245n33, 260n4 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 140–41 khayäl (imagination). See imagination/ khayäl Khidr, al-, 117, 120, 122–23, 125–26, 131, 134–35, 225, 255n4 khuräfät (superstitions). See superstition(s) (khuräfät) Kindï, al-, 87, 92, 128 knowledge: divinely revealed, 26, 57, 115; gained through dreams, 13, 144–46, 151–53, 168, 258n10; kinds of, 26. See also mind/reason Koselleck, Reinhart, 236 Lacan, Jacques, 88, 148, 177, 181, 187, 200, 238, 241, 260n3, 261–62n21 Lamoreaux, John, 14, 57, 115 language(s): angelic or divine, 131; Arabic, 41, 61, 250n9; Arabic trans-

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lations of Freud’s writings, 177–79, 178; hierarchies of, 176, 177 lä wa`y (unconscious), 45, 187–91, 261n16 lawh mahfüz (Eternal Tablet), 131, 189–90, 201–5, 226, 230 legal dimensions, 47, 263n13 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 191, 251–52n3 liminality, 57. See also in-betweenness linear temporality, laws of, 56, 223, 236–38 loudspeakers and microphones, 112– 14, 204 lying about dreams, 38, 74, 124 Madame Salwa, 71, 73, 81, 153–59, 162–63, 169–70, 188 mä´idat al-Rahmän, 84–86, 134, 267 mahdï, 31, 33–34, 38, 50, 246n1, 249n38, 267 Mahfouz, Naguib, 117–18, 255n6 Mähir, Su`äd Muhammad, 161 mahkama bätiniyya (court of hidden saints ), 35–38, 67, 247n10, 267 Mahmood, Saba, 4, 50, 140, 241n4, 242n12, 263n11 Mahmüd, Mustafä, 186, 261n15 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 12, 244n24 manuals, dream, 2, 32, 35–36, 48, 60, 209–11, 210 Maranhão, Tullio, 18 Marcuse, Herbert, 142, 242n8 Marian apparitions: baraka of, 158, 218–20; causality paradox and, 254n25; crossvisitation and, 157– 58, 258n13; in Egypt, 9–10, 235; mass mediation and, 217–18, 229, 262n9; as material sign, 89, 252n6; miracles and, 221–23; optical gaze and, 217; photographs of, 221–23; prophecy and, 217, 263n2; recycled images and, 217–18; in Shubra, 157, 243–44n19, 258n13, 262n9; in Zaytoun, 9–10, 217–19, 237, 243–44n19, 254n25, 258n13, 262n9, 263n2 Marx, Karl, 88, 261n15 mashähid ru´yä (vision sites), 161

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mass mediation: about, 29; authority of interpretation and, 225, 229–30; baraka and, 218–19, 230–31; contradictory and unanticipated effects of, 29, 200, 206–8, 230–31; democratization of interpretation of dreams and, 209–12; disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 205–7; Egyptian state regulation of, 262n2; exchanges between spiritual realms and, 206; films and, 39, 209, 216, 224, 226– 29, 230, 262n8, 263n15; hadra and, 113, 205, 218–19; handwritten versus typewritten dreams and, 200, 212; imagination and, 230–31; inbetweenness and, 203; interpretation of dreams and, 53; the (in)visible and, 204; loudspeakers and microphones, 112–14, 204; Marian apparitions and, 217–18, 229, 262n9; in media age, 204, 262n2; as metaphor, 227–29; photography and, 217–24; radio media and, 176, 260n5; Saudi critics on, 46–47, 249n31; Shaykh Qusi and, 112, 117, 205, 207–8; telephone interpretation of dreams, 73, 78, 204, 212; temporality/spatiality and, 205–6; visionary realities and, 220–21, 263n12. See also mediation; television materialist paradigm, 14, 19, 45, 89, 91, 182–83, 235 material signs, 88–89, 252n6 material support for and from community, 80–81, 82, 84, 158–59, 215, 262n7 material world, 2, 7, 34–35, 51, 52, 89, 109, 172, 235 mawlids: criticism of, 161–62; description of, 22, 112–13, 255n1, 267; disciples of Shaykh Qusi participating in, 24; material support for community during, 81; inshäd at, 113–14, 117, 255n1, 255n3; narrating dreamvisions at, 119, 133; photographs of saints distributed at, 219; poetry readings at, 113–14; of the Prophet

Muhammad, 145; shrines and, 112– 14, 123, 258n15; Sunni Islam and, 70 mediation: dreamers and, 82–83, 107, 111, 121; between God and human knowledge, 57, 115; interpretation of dreams and, 57, 81, 115; Shaykh Qusi and, 126. See also interpreter of dreams; mass mediation; ta`bïr (“taking/making swim across”) Meier, Fritz, 43, 127 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 90, 245n34 Messick, Brinkley, 57, 183, 215 metaphors, 8, 9, 16, 224–29, 245n30, 263n15 microphones and loudspeakers, 112– 14, 204 mind/reason (`aql): dreams/revelation versus, 4–5, 34, 41, 136–37, 246n8; interpretation of dreams and, 78; knowledge derived from, 26; Qur´an on, 43, 91–92 Mitchell, Timothy, 7 modernity: dream discourses in, 8–9, 10, 14, 53, 234; materialist paradigm and, 14, 19, 45, 89, 91, 182–83, 235; material signs and, 88–89, 252n6; material world and, 2, 7, 34–35, 51, 52, 89, 109, 235; as obsessed with the unthinkable, 244n20; science and, 37, 197, 261n15; spiritual science and, 182–86, 199 movies, 39, 209, 216, 224, 226–29, 230, 262n8, 263n15 munshids, 113–14, 117, 255n1, 255n3 Muslim Brotherhood, 44–46 Näbulusï, al-, 48, 58, 60, 146, 166, 209– 10, 249–50n3 nafs (self/soul), 93, 182–83, 253–54n18, 260n20, 261n14, 267 narrated dream-vision: about, 27, 115, 139, 216; authority of dreamer and, 108–9; in Book of Visions, 27, 118– 20, 124, 126–27, 131–34, 138, 201, 256n12; Islamic tradition and, 115; telling dreams and, 74–76, 167–68; vision-as-prophecy and, 134–35

Index Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 16, 19, 112, 187, 252n8 Night Journey and night journeys, 93–94, 254n19 nubuwwa (prophecy). See prophecy (nubuwwa) ocularcentrism, 85, 87–89, 109, 228, 251n2, 252n4, 252n6 openings versus closings, 2–3, 56, 200, 229, 239, 241n4 optical gaze/vision (basar): as flooded by spiritual gaze, 92–93; hierarchy of senses and, 253n11; image as different from imagination and, 17–18; inner vision versus, 67, 85–86, 88–93, 252n10, 252–53n11, 253nn12–14; Marian apparitions and, 217; as objective, 87–88, 251n2, 251–52n3; Qur´an on, 91–92, 252n10, 252–53n11, 253nn12–14 optical sight (ru´ya), 91, 109, 268 Orientalism, 40–41, 43, 137–38, 232 Others/Otherness, 5, 122–24, 141, 200, 233, 237, 261–62n1 Pandolfo, Stefania, 3, 103, 140, 142, 242n11, 242–43n13, 260n6 Patai, Raphael, 41, 248n24 performative power, 142, 238. See also dream effects; evocative power photographs/photography: of God, 221, 222, 223–24; as miraculous, 220–24; of Prophet Muhammad’s name, 223; of saints, 219–20; of spirits, 220; of Virgin, 217–18, 221–23 poetry: authorship and, 115, 118, 120–21, 128–29; confirmation of divinely inspired, 111, 120–21, 123, 125–26, 128, 131–32, 138–39, 256n10; conversations with Others and, 122–24; divine inspiration and, 128–33; dreams and, 236; ecstatic readings of, 113–14, 117, 255n3; events of another time and, 122–23, 126–28; evocative power of, 124;

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imagination and, 138, 179; inner vision/sight and, 114; posthumous, 121; the Prophet Muhammad on, 128; Prophet-visions and, 122–23, 127, 134; Qur´an on, 128; recitation of, 134–35, 266; revelation and, 132– 35; Shaykh Qusi and, 117–18; visionas-encounter and, 121–22, 122–24, 138–39; vision-as-prophecy and, 115, 138–39 political dimensions: description of, 171, 237, 239; disciplining of dreams and, 52; of dream interpretation programs on television, 33–34, 51, 204; of dreams, 3, 4, 50, 52–53, 233–39, 249n38, 263n13; of fantasy, 142; of imagination, 3, 28, 30, 239; of interpretation of dreams, 47–51, 204; reformist thinkers and, 47; visitational dreams and, 143–44, 162–63, 171–72; of visitation cycles with saints, 163, 237 possession, spirit, 26, 39, 78. See also Qur´anic healers, zär rituals power: dreams as rupturing structures of, 13, 53, 104–5, 110–11, 162–64; Foucault on, 197, 245n33, 246n2; psychology, and hegemony and, 15, 197–98; of images, 218–19; as part of dream landscapes, 20, 197–99; resistance and, 4, 50, 163, 199–200 preparedness versus production of dream-vision, 102–10, 253n28, 254nn25–26, 254–55n27 prophecy (nubuwwa): double directionality of dream-vision and, 109–10; dream-vision and, 109–10, 135–36; Elsewhere as source for, 81, 106, 137; ethical dimensions and, 237; Ibn Sïrïn and, 54; interpretation of dreams and, 47, 58, 68– 69; Marian apparitions and, 217, 263n2; preparedness versus production of dream-vision and, 107–10; the Prophet Muhammad on dreamvision and, 6; psychological concepts and, 77; rationality and, 49;

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prophecy (nubuwwa) (continued) reformist thinkers on, 34, 44, 52, 77, 136–37; sleep and, 112; temporality and, 236; unconscious in dreams and, 188–89. See also vision-as-prophecy Prophet Muhammad, the: in barzakh, 95; description of, 166, 256n9, 258– 59n18; as dream interpreter, 47, 58–59; on dreams, 6, 128; al-ghayb and, 47; hadith literature on life of, 165–66; as (in)visible, 84–85, 88–89, 109, 167–68, 219, 223, 263n13; as light, 124, 167, 256n9; mawlid of, 145; as messenger, 130; Night Journey of, 93–94, 254n19; on poetry, 128; on prophecy in dream-vision, 6; on revelation, 128; shrines of relatives of, 64, 155, 250n11; Sunni Islam on images of, 219; on symbols, 61, 250n8; virtual realities and, 224–25; wives of, 158, 167. See also Prophet-visions Prophet-visions: advice and comfort from, 168–69; afterlife and, 166, 258n17; description of the Prophet Muhammad and, 166, 258–59n18; disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 127– 28; discourses about charlatanry and, 248n23; desire and, 102; dreams foreshadowing death and, 168; evocative power of, 169–70; frequency of, 167–68, 259n19; hadith literature on, 165–66, 258n17; hierarchies and, 167–68; Ibn al-`Arabï on, 127, 166; Ibn Sïrïn on, 166; knowledge gained through, 168; intimate contact and, 168, 259n20; legal evidence and, 45–46; longing for, 102, 135; poetry and, 122–23, 127, 134; political dimensions of, 167; power of, 166– 70; psychologist on, 196–98; revelation and, 128, 133–36, 138, 165–67, 256–57n14; Salafism and, 167, 220; Shaykh Qusi and, 122–24; Sufism and, 166–68, 259n19; symbols and, 166; telling of, 167–68; visionary

realities and, 101–2, 218–19, 223; vision-as-encounter and, 101–2, 219; visitation cycles and, 164–65; Wahhabi scholars on, 167; waking dreams and, 101–2 psyche, human, 14–15, 18, 45, 190 psychology: apolitical interpretation of dreams in, 235; dream-vision and integration of terms from, 77; in Egypt, 173–74, 179–82; Islam and, 14, 183, 186; Islamization of, 186; modernity and, 137; as modern versus interpreter of dreams, 7–8; prophecy understood through, 77; Prophet-visions and, 196–98. See also Egyptian psychologists; Freud, Sigmund; Freud model in Egypt public sphere: gender and, 162–63; modernity, and widening of, 265n5; Ru´ä and, 33–34, 51, 193; telling dreams and, 234–35; visionary realities and, 3, 200, 204, 221 Qardäwï, Yüsuf, 45–46, 258n16 Qur´an: on barzakh, 37, 247n11; on classification of dreams, 6, 77; divine inspiration and, 130–31; dream discourses and, 6, 8, 27, 115; on al-ghayb, 47, 187, 260n1; on God’s nearness, 36; on God’s Ninety-Nine Names, 100, 207, 209, 254n23; on imagination/khayäl, 91–92, 253n14; on inner vision versus optical gaze, 91–92, 252n10, 252–53n11, 253nn12–14; interpretation of dreams and, 6, 8, 47, 48, 58, 61, 249n33, 250n8; on intuition, 252n7; inviting dream-visions by reciting verses from, 99, 254n22; Islamization of psychology and, 186; on mind/reason, 43, 91–92; mystical experiences and, 123–24; narrated dream-vision and, 74, 115; on poetry, 128; revelation and, 135, 256n13; on seeing, 91–92; on self/soul, 261n14; on spirit, 93, 253n16; tafsïr and, 6, 58, 230, 250n7; as trope for under-

Index standing dream-visions, 115, 128– 35, 138–9; vision-as-prophecy and, 115, 134. See also hadith literature; Prophet Muhammad, the Qur´anic healers, 39, 57, 168, 181, 184, 243n14, 247n15, 260–61n11 raghba (desire), 7, 12, 27, 87, 102, 103, 151–52, 161, 182, 186, 190, 195–98, 235 Ramadan, 84–85, 90, 118–19 rationalism, 13, 31, 41–44, 45, 49, 130, 246n8 real, the: ethnographies, and the invisible versus, 21, 27–28, 83, 86– 87, 251–52n3; imaginary versus, 7, 19, 34–35, 51–52, 228; rethinking community and subjectivity by rethinking parameters of, 5; surrealism and, 75, 117–18, 120; understandings of, 2, 5, 241n3; use of term, 241n3; virtual realities and, 204, 225–26, 228–29, 230; visible reality and, 2, 85, 87–89, 88, 109, 252n4, 252n6. See also mind/reason (`aql); virtual realities; visionary realities (re)burial, and building of shrines, 160–61, 170, 237 recycled images, 53, 147, 216–24, 220–24 redreamed dreams, 53, 147, 218 reformist thinkers: on afterlife, 36; on barzakh, 7, 37; on charlatanry, 52; on divine inspiration, 42–43, 45, 49, 130; on dreams as outside tradition, 115; on dream discourses, 4–5; on ethics, 7, 44; gender and, 162–63; on imagination, 44; on intuition, 136; on inviting dreamvisions, 104; on legal dimension of dreams, 47; on mind/reason versus dreams/revelation, 4–5, 34, 43, 136–37; Muslim Brotherhood and, 44–46; on political dimensions of dreams, 47; on prophecy, 34, 44, 52, 77, 136–37; on public sphere and

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dreams, 47; on saints as truly dead, 37; Saudi scholars and, 46–47; on socio-moral reform of society, 7, 37; on superstitions, 52, 162, 183–84; on visitational dreams, 29, 161–63, 170. See also Islamic Revival; Salafism resistance, 4, 50, 163, 199–200 revelation (wahy): boundaries of, 135– 37; dream-vision and, 4–5, 34, 133– 36, 256–57n14; mind/reason versus, 4–5, 34, 41, 136–37, 246n8; Orientalism on, 43, 137–38; poetry and, 132–35; the Prophet Muhammad on, 128; Prophet-visions and, 128, 133– 36, 138, 165–67, 256–57n14; Qur´an and, 135, 256n13; Salafism on, 34; unconscious and, 137; vision-asprophecy and, 132–37 Ridä, Muhammad Rashïd, 42–44, 45, 50, 136 Rodinson, Maxime, 137 Romantic movement, 17, 187, 244n20 rüh (spirit). See spirit (rüh) Ru´ä (TV show), 32–34, 51–52, 191–95 ru´ya (optical sight), 91, 109, 268 ru´yä (dream- or waking vision). See dream-vision (ru´yä); waking vision (ru´yä) rules of conduct for the sleeper, 96, 98–100, 143, 254n22, 257n6 Sabähï, Shaykh Ahmad al-, 185, 237, 264n3 Safouan, Mustafa, 177–79, 260n7, 261n16 saints (awliyä´): baraka of, 220; barzakh and, 157; body as preserved after burial of, 160, 258n14; (re)burial and building of shrines for, 160–61, 170, 237; confirmation of vision-asencounter and, 125; court of hidden, 35–38, 67, 247n10, 267; cycles of visitation with, 153–56; description of, 241–42n6; divine inspiration from, 70; electricity analogy and, 24; photographs of, 219; recycled images and, 218; shrines of, 64, 154–55, 250n11;

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saints (awliyä´) (continued) sightings of, 236–37; temporality and, 206, 233; as truly dead, 37; as (in)visible, 89, 109, 236–37, 239; vision sites and, 161. See also visitation cycles with saints (awliyä´) Salafism: on afterlife, 220; description and history of, 34, 248n28, 268; on divine inspiration, 130; on dream discourses, 43–44, 130, 188–89; on al-ghayb as inaccessible, 47; on the (in)visible, 84–91; on mind/ reason versus dreams/revelation, 34; Muslim Brotherhood and, 44; on Prophet-visions, 167, 220; on rational thought and defense of Islam, 41–44, 45, 130; Ridä and, 42– 45, 50, 136; spiritualism and, 220; on Sufism, 43–44; Wahhabism, and influences on, 42–43, 46. See also Azhar, al-; Islamic Revival; reformist thinkers Säriya and ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattäb story, 227 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 17, 245n34 Saudi Arabia: authority of interpretation in, 196–98, 261n20; discourses on charlatanry in, 39, 195–96; disciples of Shaykh Qusi in, 24; Internet Web sites and, 46; influences of, 46; interpretation of dreams and, 46–47, 195–98, 197, 249n31, 261n21; Mecca insurrection in, 50, 249n38; Night Journey discourse in, 94; psychologists on Prophet-visions and, 196–98. See also Wahhabism Sayyida Nafïsa, 63–64, 71, 112, 114, 123, 153–56, 163, 250n11 Sayyida Ruqayya, 64, 66–68, 70–71, 161, 162, 250n11 Sayyida Zaynab, 154–55, 159, 163, 250n11, 267 science, 37, 197, 261n15 science, spiritual, 182–86, 199 screens, and dream-vision, 228–29 self: agency versus, 5, 242n12; cultivation of, 5, 102–5; Elsewhere and reli-

gious, 190–91; ethics beyond, 5, 231; Freud model in Egypt, and dreams that originate within, 184–85; imagination and, 16; interrelational understanding of, 241n5; istikhära and, 97–98; reformist thinkers on reform of, 47–52. See also self/soul (nafs) self/soul (nafs), 93, 182, 253–54n18, 260n20, 261n14, 267 sexual dreams, 76, 143, 185, 196 Shädhilï, Abü al-Hasan, 23, 94, 160, 166, 206, 220, 256n10 Sha`räwï, Mutawallï al-, 65–66, 160, 258n15 Shaykh `Abdullah, 135–38 Shaykh `Alï Gum`a, 91, 253n13, 254n21 Shaykh Gharïb, 160 Shaykh Hanafi: on awakening, 49–51, 204; al-Azhar and, 25, 48, 78, 194– 95, 233; causality paradox and, 104; on dream-vision, 76; face-to-face interpretation of dreams and, 78; on interpretation of dreams as supported in Qur´an, 48; as legitimate Muslim scholar, 48–49; life history of, 25; on mahdï dream, 31–32; mass mediation of dream interpretation and, 53; on preparedness/ unpreparedness, 99, 104, 110; on rationality in interpretation of dreams, 31, 49; Ru´ä and, 32–34, 51– 52, 53, 191–95; on rules of conduct for the sleeper, 99; on self-reform through interpretation of dreams, 47–52; on spirit, 94–95; telephone interpretation of dreams, 78; TV satellite station broadcasts, 53, 195 Shaykh Mustafa (pseud.), 26, 100–102, 188, 227–28, 252n7 Shaykh Mutawallï al-Sha`räwï, 160, 258n10 Shaykh Nabil: advice beyond interpretation of dreams and, 79–80, 82; on burial location for Ibn Sïrïn, 64; as caretaker of Ibn Sïrïn shrine, 54–55, 65–66, 71–72; on classification of dreams, 76–77; cyber-interpretations

Index and Internet Web site of, 27, 56, 187, 204, 208–9, 211–12; dervishes and, 67, 70; dream discourses and, 76–77, 82, 189; on dreams of the dead, 150; on ethics, 152–53, 216, 258n10; face-to-face interpretation of dreams and, 56, 71–74, 211–12, 214–15; films and, 209, 230; on Freud, 190–91; on hallucinatory wish fulfillment, 190–91; healing and, 79–80; Ibn Sïrïn’s relation with, 54–57, 249n1; initiation of, 67–71; interpretation of dreams and, 75–76, 77–79, 152–53, 187–88, 216; as interpreter of dreams in Ibn Sïrïn shrine, 74–76, 215; on intuition, 212, 215; life history of, 23–24, 66–71; material support for and from community, and role of, 80–81, 82, 215, 262n7; mediation and, 81; photograph of, 59; professional identity on Internet Web site of, 208–9, 216; psychological terms integrated into understanding of dream-vision by, 77, 187–91; self and dream theory of, 190–91; on sleep and wakefulness line, 191; Sufism and, 70; on symbols in interpretation of dreams, 78–79; telephone interpretation of dreams and, 212; telling of dreams and, 74–76, 251n16; textual tradition, and writings by, 70; threshold of Ibn Sïrïn shrine and, 57–58, 59, 66, 79, 82; on unconscious, 187–91; on visitational dreams, 152–53, 258n10; on waking vision, 82 Shaykh Qusi: about, 24–25, 112–15; on access to religious knowledge, 116, 207–8; authority of interpretation and, 111, 120, 121, 123, 125–26, 128, 139, 256n10; al-Azhar relationship with, 116; barzakh and conversations with, 148–50; confirmation of divinely inspired poetry and, 111, 120–21, 123, 125–26, 128, 131–32, 138–39, 256n10; conversations with

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Others, and poetry of, 122–24; death and burial of, 149, 201, 239– 40, 264n5; divinely inspired poetry and, 19, 129–32; ecstatic poetry reading and, 113–14, 117, 255n3; electricity analogy and, 24; events of another time in poetry of, 122, 126–28; on image as different from imagination, 18–19; on imagination as different from fantasy, 19; on inner vision, 92–93; on intuition, 19, 149; on Islamic orthodoxy, 116; alKhidr’s relationship with, 117, 120; mass mediation and, 112, 117, 205, 207–8; on night journeys of spirit, 94; photograph of, 113; as poet, 117– 18; Prophet-visions and poetry of, 122–23, 127, 134; revelation and poetry of, 132–35; on the senses, 84; as Sïdï, 94, 114, 116, 131, 201, 239, 268; on spirit, 115; Sufism versus path taught by, 115–17; vision-asencounter and poetry of, 121–24; on waking vision, 93. See also disciples of Shaykh Qusi shaykhs, 63, 116, 245–46n36. See also specific shaykhs Shaykh Sabähï, 185, 237, 264n3 Shaykh Sayyid, 69–70, 78, 212 Shi`ite Islam, 161, 219, 246n1, 250n11, 258n16 shrines: baraka of, 71, 156, 215; (re)burial, and building of, 160–61, 170, 237; of relatives of the Prophet Muhammad, 64, 155, 250n11; of saints, 64, 154–55, 250n11; as vision sites, 161; visitation cycles and, 153– 56, 170. See also Ibn Sïrïn shrine sight, inner. See inner vision/sight (basïra) sight, optical (ru´ya), 91, 109, 268 silence about dreams, 23, 246n37 sincere gaze. See inner vision/sight (basïra) sleep and wakefulness line: in anthropological dream studies, 10–13, 244nn21–24; for Coptic Christians,

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sleep and wakefulness line (continued) 243n17; cyber interpretations and, 213; dream discourses and, 6, 10– 11, 51, 243n17; Freud on, 11, 191; al-Ghazälï on, 13, 244n26; Greek philosophy and, 244 Smith, Jane, 151–52, 156, 220, 258n10 social relations, and shrines, 82, 153– 54, 155 socio-moral condition of society, 1–2, 7, 34, 37–38, 50–51 soul/self (nafs), 93, 182, 253–54n18, 260n20, 261n14, 267 space, 4, 70, 148–50, 225, 234. See also either/or space; imagination/khayäl spirit (rüh): barzakh and, 94–95; body versus, 10–11, 13, 88, 93–95, 236, 244n21, 244n25; death and, 149–50, 151; dream-vision and, 93, 99, 189; inner vision and, 91; jinn versus, 243n14; night journeys of, 93–95; Qur´an on, 93, 253n16; self/soul and, 93, 182, 260n20; temporality and, 94 spirit possession, 26, 39, 78. See also Qur´anic healers; zär rituals spiritual science, 182–86, 199 Starrett, Gregory, 221 suddenness/unpredictability of dreamvisions, 102–10, 253n28, 254nn25–26, 254–55n27 Sufism: awakening and, 239; causality paradox and, 103–4; criticisms of, 43, 45; on death versus life, 239; description of, 26; on divinely inspired poetry, 128–29; dream discourses and, 239; Egyptian state regulation of, 33; history of, 259n19; imaginary and, 23, 117; marginalization of, 23; mystical path in, 92– 93, 253n15; on the Prophet Muhammad, 256n9; Prophet-visions and, 166–68, 259n19; Salafism on, 43–44; self and, 115, 183, 253–54n18; Shaykh Qusi and, 115–17; spiritualsocial relations with the dead and, 121; vision-as-prophecy in, 23, 117.

See also imagination/khayäl; specific shaykhs Sunni Islam: al-Azhar as official institutional voice of, 25, 33, 116, 246n4; images of the Prophet Muhammad and, 219; mahdï in religious imaginations of, 31, 33, 34, 38, 50, 246n1, 249n38, 267; mawlids and, 70; Salafism and, 34, 268; schools of law in, 35, 161, 246–47n9; visitation with saints in, 161. See also Wahhabism superstition(s) (khuräfät): Egyptian psychologists and, 52, 181–84, 260– 61n11; Egyptian state on interpretation of dreams as, 38–39; reformist thinkers on interpretation of dreams as, 52, 162, 183–84; statistics on practices of, 39; “true Islam” and, 38–40, 49, 52; Wahhabism on, 261 surrealism, 75, 117–18, 120 symbols, 7, 36, 60–61, 78–79, 166, 250n8, 257nn7–9 ta`bïr (“taking/making swim across”), 54, 57, 69, 243, 249–50n3 tafsïr (Qur´an interpretation), 6, 58, 230, 250n7 “taking/making swim across” (ta`bïr), 54, 57, 69, 243, 249–50n3 technologies of the self, 96, 102–4, 254n20 telephone interpretation of dreams, 73, 78, 204, 212 television: as awakening, 49–51, 204; al-Azhar on interpretation of dreams on, 52–53; Egyptian state regulation of dream interpretation programs on, 32–33, 37; interpretation of dreams and, 204, 208, 216, 218; religious knowledge and, 209; Ru´ä, 32–34, 51–52, 191–95; satellite station broadcasts, 47, 53, 195, 196, 207, 227; Saudi Arabia and interpretation of dreams on, 195–98, 197, 261n21; science and Islam series on, 261n15;

Index visionary realities and, 222, 224, 226–28, 230 telling dreams, 23, 74–76, 167–68, 251nn16–17. See also narrated dream-vision temporality: context and, 77, 90–91, 235–36; dual, 126–28; ethnography and, 256n12; hadith literature and, 126–27; invisible/inner reality versus, 87; laws of linear, 56, 223, 236–38; mass mediation and, 205–6; prophecy and, 236; saints and, 206; spirit and, 94; waking vision and, 91 Theresa (saint), 157–58 threshold (dihlïz), 57–58, 59, 66, 79, 82 Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams; Freud), 146–48, 177–79, 178 “true Islam” ideological contestation, 28–29, 33, 38–40, 49, 52 Tylor, E. B., 10–11, 16, 19 unconscious (lä wa`y), 45, 187–91, 261n16 unconscious as Western concept, 13– 20, 245n29, 261–62n21 unpredictability/suddenness of dreamvisions, 102–10, 253n28, 254nn25– 26, 254–55n27 virtual realities: about, 229–31; Catholicism and, 221–23, 229–30; disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 205; Eternal Egypt Web site and, 201–4; imagination/khayäl compared with, 225; istikhära prayer and, 220; metaphors and, 224–29, 263n15; miraculous photographs and, 220– 24; the Prophet Muhammad and, 224–25; the real and, 204, 225–26, 228–29, 230; recycled images and, 53, 147, 216–24, 220–24; spiritual practice and, 205–8. See also cyber interpretations; Marian apparitions; mass mediation; real, the; visionary realities visible reality (zähir), 2, 85, 87–89, 109,

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252n4, 252n6. See also real, the; virtual realities; visionary realities vision. See inner vision/sight (basïra); optical gaze/vision (basar) visionary realities: disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 206–7, 216; hadra text merging with, 101–2, 219; Marian apparitions and, 221–23, 235; mass mediation and, 206–7, 216, 220–21, 222, 263n12; Prophet-visions and, 101–2, 218–19, 223; public sphere and, 3, 200, 204, 221; television and, 222, 224, 226–28, 230; texts merging with, 101–2, 219. See also real, the; virtual realities vision-as-encounter: conversations with Others and, 122–24; with the dead, 120–24; description of, 18, 129; disciples of Shaykh Qusi, and confirmation of, 121, 125–26, 128, 138–39; events of another time and, 126–28; evidence and, 124–26; hadith literature and, 115, 121–22, 126–27, 138; poetry and, 121–24, 138–39; Prophet-visions and, 101–2, 219; texts merging with visionary realities and, 101–2, 219 vision-as-prophecy: description of, 129, 137–39; dictation and, 129–30, 256n11; dreamers and, 3, 8, 49, 96, 99, 108; evidential visions and, 130–32; al-Ghazälï on, 128; hadith literature and, 6, 136, 256–57n14; imagination/khayäl and, 23, 117; al-Khidr and, 134–35, 225; narrated dream-vision and, 134–35; poetry and, 115, 138–39; Qur´an and, 115, 134; revelation and, 132–37. See also divine inspiration (ilhäm); prophecy (nubuwwa) vision sites (mashähid ru´yä), 161 vision theories, Greek, 87, 228 visitational dreams: about, 170–72; conversations in the barzakh and, 148–50; cycles of visitation with saints and, 153–58; dreams foreshadowing death and, 150, 257n9;

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visitational dreams (continued) ethics and, 140–41, 152–53, 171–72, 258n10; evocative power of, 7, 142– 44, 146–48, 151–52, 257n4; gender and, 162–63; Greek literature and, 170; hierarchies and, 170; knowledge gained from, 144–46, 151–53, 168, 258n10; political dimensions of, 143–44; reformist thinkers on, 29, 161–63, 170; Wahhabism on, 161. See also visitation cycles with saints (awliyä´) visitation cycles with saints (awliyä´): about, 170–72; dream-vision and, 156–57; Elsewhere and, 163; ethics and, 163–64; evocative power and, 158–61, 170; intimate contact and, 155–56, 155; mutuality and, 156–58; political dimensions of, 163, 237; (re)burial and building of shrines and, 160–61, 170; shrines and, 153– 56, 160–61, 170; visitational dreams and, 153–58. See also saints (awliyä´); visitational dreams visitors to Ibn Sïrïn shrine, 66, 71–74, 250–51n13 Vries, Hent de, 5, 228

dreams of desire and, 195–98; dream versus, 82; hadra and, 101; hallucinatory wish fulfillment versus, 86– 87, 191–98; inner vision and, 89; the (in)visible and, 89, 91; invocation/ remembrance of God and, 21, 101– 2; marginalization of, 43; temporality and, 91 Watt, Montgomery, 137–38 Weber, Samuel, 228–29, 262n2 Web sites. See Internet Web sites Western discourses: ethical dimensions in, 141–42, 257n2; imagination genealogy in, 16–18; unconscious in, 13–20, 245n29, 261–62n21 Williams, Raymond, 197–98 wish fulfillment, hallucinatory. See hallucinatory wish fulfillment writing, and relationship with the dead/death, 120–21 writing, creative, 133 writing as handwritten versus typewritten, 200, 212 writing dreams in fieldwork, 21–22, 27–30, 132–33, 246n37, 256n12 writing ethnography, 27–28, 238, 256n12

Wahhabism: description of, 46, 268; on dreams, 261; on al-ghayb as inaccessible, 47; Internet Web sites and, 46; on interpretation of dreams, 195–98, 261, 261n20; on Prophetvisions, 167; Salafism and influences of, 42–43, 46; on superstitions, 261; on visitational dreams, 161; on visits to saint shrines, 161. See also Saudi Arabia wahy (revelation). See revelation (wahy) waking vision (ru´yä): conditions for, 91, 96; description of, 6, 91–93;

Yüsuf (prophet), 6, 58, 61, 68–70, 74, 104, 177 Yüsuf story, 6, 58, 61, 68–70, 74, 104, 177 zähir (visible reality), 2, 85, 87–89, 109, 252n4, 252n6. See also real, the; virtual realities; visionary realities zär rituals, 39, 247n15, 260–61n11, 268 Zawäwï, Muhammad al-, 124 Ziwer, Mustafa, 174–81, 187 Ziwer, Nevine, 176, 180–82

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