SITUATING THE BOOK OF VISIONS: EGYPT'S DREAM LANDSCAPES

Although a number of scholars have remarked upon the extraordinary epistemological value of dream visions and waking visions in the Islamic tradition, the role of dreams in the contemporary Muslim world has received little ethnographic attention to date.¹¹

My research in Cairo in 2003 and 2004 took dream discourses and practices as a starting point for unraveling conflicting interpretations of the Islamic tradition. I was particularly interested in the predicament of prophecy and imagination in an Islamic modernity. Precisely because the dream's prophetic value is so heavily contested today, it provides a revealing lens into Egypt's multifaceted religious landscapes.

Although Ibn Taymiyya expressed concern about an overvaluation of mystical experiences as early as the 14th century,¹²

the prophetic value of dream visions has increasingly come under attack in the postcolonial era. One of the major challenges to religious dream models in contemporary Egypt is psychoanalysis. As Ashis Nandy notes, having become a “positive science, an exportable technology, and an index of progress,” psychoanalysis was imported “into the [so-called] savage world in the high noon of imperialism.”¹³ In Egypt, Freud's theories also arrived as part of a larger modernization movement spurred by the urgently felt and constantly recreated need to “catch up” with Europe. In 1950, Taha Hussein, then minister of education, appointed Mustafa Ziwer to found the first psychology department in Egypt. Ziwer had studied philosophy, medicine, chemistry, biology, and applied psychology in France, and he had undergone analysis in Paris. In addition to teaching psychology in Cairo, he supervised the translation of Freud's work into Arabic and spread psychological knowledge to the Egyptian public by way of a radio program.

Today, Cairo's bookstalls are filled with titles such as Dreams and Nightmares: Scientific and Religious Interpretation, Dreams Between Science and Belief, and The Foundations and Principles of Dream Interpretation Between Freud and the Muslim Scholars.¹⁴

Popular Egyptian preachers like Mustafa Mahmud have attempted to bring together Islam and Western psychology, and a popular weekly dream interpretation program on Egyptian national television used to feature two dream experts, a shaykh and a psychologist. During my fieldwork I often found that Freudian terms have seeped into Egyptians' everyday dream discourses. Yet, although the two dream models have inflected one another in many ways, the unconscious and the barzakh are not always compatible, and Western-trained psychologists frequently denounce religious dream interpretation as charlatanry and superstition.

What complicates Egypt's dream landscapes even more is that not only psychologists dismiss traditional dream beliefs but so, too, do many Muslim reformers. Azharite officials, the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Affairs, the renowned Islamist Yusuf al-Qardawi, and Ibn Baz, the former state mufti of Saudi Arabia—all have expressed concern in recent years over the public's growing interest in dreams and dream interpretation.¹⁵

The critical suspicion against those who declare themselves to be intermediaries between ordinary believers and the divine, which was given a new sense of urgency by 19th-century reformers, is still prevalent today. To undermine both the dreamer's and the interpreter's claims to semiprophetic insight, Muslim reformers insist that dreams quite generally originate in the unconscious and are of relevance at best only to the dreamers themselves but never to society at large.

Related to the distinctively, if not uniquely, modern notion that all dreams originate inside the dreamer is a particular understanding of creative inspiration. Unconfined by the limitations of rational thought, dreams are considered to open a door to the depths of human creativity—perhaps most vividly expressed in the sign “Poet at Work” placed on a sleeping poet's door in Paris in the 1920s.¹⁶

In his 1908 essay “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Freud calls the writer a dreamer in broad daylight.¹⁷ The creative potential of dreams has been exploited by contemporary Egyptian authors as well. Most notably, recently deceased Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz turned his dreams into (very) short stories published under the title Ahlam fatrat al-naqaha (Recuperation Dreams).¹⁸ In a newspaper column, Mahfouz identified his new style as one of magical realism, a genre of writing usually associated with Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, which combines truth with invention and fantasy with reality. Although Mahfouz stated in an interview that “there may be a Sufi touch” to his dream narratives,¹⁹ his understanding of the creative power of dreams seems for the most part to follow a secular notion of literary inspiration. His dream stories, while surreal, offer glimpses into childhood memories. Yet, next to the corpus of internationally celebrated and translated Egyptian literatures, of which Mahfouz is probably the best known example, other forms of writing (and other dreams) circulate in Cairo and participate in different conceptions of the real.

In spite of the Egyptian state and reformist attempts to rid Islam of all supposed superstitions, believers from various class backgrounds in Egypt allow space for nonrational forms of knowledge. In focusing on the evidential value ascribed to dream visions within Shaykh al-Qusi's group, I complement an article by Michael Gilsenan on the role of dreams among illiterate Egyptian peasant women.²⁰

Shaykh al-Qusi holds a degree in science from a Czechoslovakian university, and he has worked in the fields of chemistry and geology in Egypt, Germany, Spain, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Most of his followers are well off, highly educated, and hold influential positions in the military, ministries, banks, and large companies. Thinking about these upper-class dreamers and visionaries can help us challenge the common divide between elite and popular religiosities. Although classical sociological literature treats sainthood as counterthematic to modernity,²¹ various religious forms of knowledge and practice coexist within the space of the modern, and, as Charles Hirschkind argues, tradition-cultivated modes of perception at times are even “enabled in some ways by the very conditions that constitute modernity.”²²

The Book of Visions is one of the many different media through which Shaykh al-Qusi's group records its activities. Other media include video and audio recordings, photographs, the Internet, and didactic books. From this multimedia legacy I draw on only two sources in this article: the handwritten Book of Visions and the shaykh's published poetry. The latter is often dream-inspired as well, and like the followers' dreams, it is believed to originate in an “elsewhere.” The practices surrounding the Book of Visions—the telling, writing, reading, interpreting, and discussing of dreams—enable the followers to participate in and understand their shaykh's spiritual authority and divine inspiration. In addition to participating in the shaykh's poetic and mystical inspiration, the disciples witness his inspired state through their dreams and visions. In Shaykh al-Qusi's group, imaginary experiences thus exceed the individual and continuously reconfirm and reconstitute the community.

Describing how divine inspiration, authorship, and temporality are understood within this group of believers, I now turn to two different yet overlapping tropes: the vision as encounter and the vision as prophecy. Some narratives in the Book of Visions emulate the face-to-face encounters of the hadith genre, but others signify eruptions of a timeless truth from an elsewhere, similar to those in the Qurءan. In reading dreams and visions in dialogue with the two sacred genres, I stretch Talal Asad's proposition that an anthropology of Islam should understand Islam as a “discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Quran and the Hadith.”²³

As will be shown, the tropes of the Qurءan and the hadith figure into and are reconfigured in the realm of the imagination as well. I propose that a focus on discursive engagements with the founding texts can be expanded by also looking at imaginary, less easily graspable forms of engagement. The tradition is not only read, studied, discussed, taught, debated, and embodied in visible everyday contexts, but it is experienced and resignified in an invisible realm as well. It both structures the imagination and is exceeded by it.

VISION AS ENCOUNTER: IMAGINARY INTERLOCUTORS

When I first asked Shaykh al-Qusi about his poetry, his immediate response was that none of it is “made up.” Rather, he said, it is “all conversations,” and he explained:

While talking to me, Shaykh al-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, and, through referring to these sense experiences, he was distinguishing between the experienced and the made up. In a poem, the shaykh describes how he was first directed onto the path of visionary guidance: The range of sense experiences is widened here: not only does Shaykh al-Qusi see the Prophet, he also hears him. More precisely, he is instructed through a visionary order to listen only to the Prophet and his saintly descendants. This instruction could potentially be self-subverting. Yet, ultimately the poem is an invitation for others to witness the shaykh's contact to the “highest of the family of Muhammad.” In subsequent poems Shaykh al-Qusi describes being visited (while both asleep and awake) not only by the Prophet but also by other prophets (David, Jacob, Jesus), by direct descendents and companions of the Prophet (ʿAli, Husain, ʿUmar, Bilal, Hamza), hadith transmitters (al-Bukhari, al-Hasan al-Basri), and by great Sufi saints (al-Sayyid al-Badawi).²⁵ A frequent interlocutor is also the immortal and mythical al-Khidr, who provides guidance to Sufis and travelers.²⁶ Often the imaginary interlocutors become the direct sources of quotes (e.g., “And al-Khidr said to me …”). Other times the origin of the shaykh's words is deferred, because it is not specified who is speaking (e.g., “And it was said to me …” or “It came to me someone who said …”).

Far from being invented, the shaykh's poems draw on face-to-face encounters with the Prophet, his companions, and the awliyāء, who lived many centuries ago but whose spirits are still present and accessible (to some). Although reformist scholars often insist that the dead are irreversibly separated from the living because “behind those [who leave the world] there is a barrier [of death] until the Day when all will be raised from the dead,”²⁷

many contemporary Egyptians claim that al-Khidr is immortal and that the spirits of the Prophet and those of the awliyāء are still present.

Further, many of my interlocutors in Cairo described how the spirits of the dead and the living mingle in the barzakh during times of sleep. At night one can see, talk to, and learn from the dead. In addition, in early texts of the tradition, the dead were considered to be reliable witnesses that could disclose knowledge about the afterlife to those who had yet to join them. A classical dream genre in Islamic biographical dictionaries and dream manuals tells stories of the dead returning to inform the living of what they had experienced after death. As Fedwa Malti-Douglas observes, “those who were seen in the afterlife are actually, and not symbolically, present. It is this which permits the dream to transmit an authoritative judgment.”²⁸

On occasion the dead not only have authority but can become authors as well. Sudanese Shaykh Muhammad al-Burhani died on 4 April 1983. Yet, when a collection of his poems was published ten years later, one poem listed as the date of its composition 13 April 1983. This seeming paradox provoked ethnomusicologist Michael Frishkopf to argue that the ability of Sufis to posthumously deliver poetic verses 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.”²⁹

Shaykh al-Qusi, like Shaykh al-Burhani, is an “author” in the sense that his name is attached to his writings and regulates the status of his work and its manner of reception.³⁰ Although followers effusively praise Shaykh al-Qusi for his poems, much of his poetry draws on encounters with long-deceased interlocutors. The poetry is not rooted within the author as a self-contained, creative subject but is the effect of dialogical encounters. It springs from dreams and visions that enable a form of interlocution that circumvents the sharp line drawn between the dead and the living.

Throughout history, Muslim (and particularly Sufi) poets have been directly inspired by dream visions. Imaginary interlocutors in dreams and visions dictated poetry to them, inspired them to write or publish, instructed them in which language to use, or retrospectively praised them for something already written. The Indian poet Muhammad Iqbal, for instance, who during his youth exclusively wrote in Urdu, was inspired in 1913 by a dream apparition of the great Sufi poet Rumi to write in Persian as well.³¹

Ibn Abi al-Dunya's 9th-century collection of traditional dream narratives includes an entire section on “poetry that has been transmitted in sleep and was then memorized.”³² The 13th-century poet al-Busiri had what might be called “writer's block” while composing the famous poem Qasidat al-burda (Ode of the Mantle) and was only able to complete it when the Prophet dictated the missing verses to him. At around the same time, the Prophet also is said to have inspired Ibn al-Farid, who, according to his grandson, would go into trance and upon recovery would recite thirty verses.³³

Without explicitly evoking these historical precedents, accounts of the origins of Shaykh al-Qusi's poetry draw on and contribute to a similar model of inspiration. In one of his poems, the shaykh describes the process of writing not as individual creation but as something more akin to dictation:

The shaykh's ability to encounter the Prophet and other interlocutors is confirmed by his followers' own visions. Unlike Muhammad al-Zawawi, a 15th-century Algerian Sufi and jurist who claimed to be in regular contact with the Prophet but who was unable to convince others of his chosen status, Shaykh al-Qusi's visionary experiences are widely recognized. Al-Zawawi left a written account of his weekly and, later on, daily encounters with the Prophet but supposedly remained a “failed saint” during his lifetime.³⁵ By contrast, Shaykh al-Qusi's spiritual authority is to a large extent established and maintained through his disciples' own dream and waking visions. Many of their visions confirm his intimate contact with the Prophet, the saints, and al-Khidr.

The followers' confirmatory visions, in turn, are frequently evoked by the shaykh's poetry. Shaykh al-Qusi's poetry books are given out free of charge, but, fully aware of his poetry's evocative power, he usually decides which of the books will be beneficial for each particular person to whom he speaks. He also occasionally reads his most recent poems at the group's private nightly gatherings; at other times his more long-standing disciples recite and explain poems to other followers. On saint-day celebrations (mawlids) and other festive occasions, public recitations make the poetry available to a larger audience. During such occasions many men and women in the group witnessed how the Prophet gave presents to or praised Shaykh al-Qusi. A middle-aged pharmacist recorded the following waking vision that she had seen during al-Sayyida Nafisa's mawlid:

The woman witnessed Shaykh al-Qusi's face-to-face encounters with the Prophet and some of his saintly descendants. Her vision was evoked by the ḥaḍra, during which the group collectively recited a text that included Qurءanic verses, prayers for the Prophet, God's ninety-nine names, and some of the shaykh's poetry. Reading or listening to Shaykh al-Qusi's dream-inspired poetry often evokes dreams and visions in his followers that confirm his inspired state. The imaginary encounters that inspire (and are recorded in) the poetry then pave the road for more encounters to happen, many of which, in turn, confirm that the poet did not invent his poetry. The following vision, which a woman saw at another mawlid, was directly evoked by the shaykh's poetry: “During the public recitation [inshād] of the poems of Shaykh [al-Qusi] I saw al-Sayyida Khadija [the Prophet's first wife] being around the shaykh as if she were taking care of him and surrounding him.” Here, the inshād becomes a medium that links the shaykh's imaginary experiences to those of his disciples. The shaykh's own capacity to directly encounter the Prophet, al-Khidr, and the awliyāء is reconfirmed by the visionary experiences induced through the musical performance of his poetry.

In addition to witnessing the shaykh's intimate closeness to the awliyāء and the Prophet, at times disciples receive through their visions messages or poetic verses for the shaykh. They need not understand these messages but are merely obliged to pass them on. During the time of my fieldwork, two of the women stood out as transmitters of messages from al-Khidr to the shaykh: Maha, the woman in charge of the Book of Visions, who was married and around forty years old, and Sharifa, unmarried and in her late twenties. Encouraged by the shaykh, both women spoke of their experiences during the group's gatherings, and he occasionally joked that al-Khidr must be mad at him and therefore did not come to him directly anymore. Maha generally did not see al-Khidr but merely heard him. He would tell her new 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 with a noticeable increase in her heartbeat.

The imaginary interlinking of the shaykh, his disciples, al-Khidr, the Prophet, and the awliyāء is made possible through (and makes possible) a not exclusively linear temporality. The visionary experiences that inspire Shaykh al-Qusi's poetry, as well as those inspired by it, render visible “events of past centuries.” This nonlinear temporality is particularly evident in the following narrative from the Book of Visions:

Whether explicitly indexed by their clothes or not, many interlocutors in dream and waking visions seem to be visitors from another time. While visions often evoke future temporalities, informing or warning the dreamer of what is about to happen, they also can provide access to the past. This access does not rest easily with a linear temporality that has long been dominant in Western historiography but that is also a key premise in the hadith sciences. The authenticity of hadiths was established in part through ʿilm al-rijāl, the “science of men,” which determined the reliability of hadith transmitters. The transmitters were judged based on their general capacity, moral character, and linguistic ability. A second criterion for the authenticity of a hadith relied on the continuity of the chain of transmitters (isnād) and the likelihood of their truly having met face to face. Parallel to the personal encounters that are so central to the hadith sciences, dreams and visions often involve face-to-face encounters. The parallel nature of the two genres might explain why Ibn al-ʿArabi referred to those who see and talk to the Prophet in visions as the Prophet's companions (ṣaḥāba).³⁶

The way Shaykh al-Qusi and his followers narrate such imaginary experiences actively draws on, mirrors, and stretches notions of face-to-face encounters central to the hadith genre. In its form, the Book of Visions references the hadith literature, in which each entry consists of two elements: matn and isnād. The former is the actual text that is transmitted, and the latter lists the uninterrupted chain of transmitters, such as “so-and-so reported that so-and-so narrated to us from so-and-so from ʿAءisha [the Prophet's wife], who said …” In the Book of Visions, similarly, the switch from red to black distinguishes the framing remarks that identify the narrator (parallel to the isnād) from the actual vision text (parallel to the matn). All entries in the Book of Visions are further introduced by the phrase “transmitted by” (naqlan ʿan), characterizing the narrators as eyewitnesses.

In spite of these parallels, there are clear distinctions between the genre of the hadith and the Book of Visions. Whereas in the hadith sciences it is of great importance whether two transmitters lived at the same time and whether they really could have met in person, dreams and visions evade linear temporalities and conventional spatial restrictions. The likelihood of Shaykh al-Qusi's followers truly having met the Prophet or the awliyāء hinges neither on their physical location nor on their birthdates but on their closeness to the shaykh and their spiritual advancement. Within the group it is generally assumed that whoever claims to have seen the Prophet has really seen him. A hadith underlines the validity of Prophet visions, as the Prophet himself has said that “whoever sees me in his sleep has truly seen me because the Devil cannot take my form.”³⁷

Although it can never be verified which dreams or visions were really seen, the Islamic tradition further cautions strongly against the telling of invented dreams. According to hadiths, those who lie about their dreams will be gravely punished in the hereafter, as “the worst lie is that a person claims to have had a dream which he has not had.”³⁸ As dream visions can be a way to get religious authority, many of my interlocutors in Egypt insisted on the importance of this interdiction.

Although distinguishing between truth and falsehood, Shaykh al-Qusi believes that texts need not be datable within a particular historical sequence. The linear progression of time is ruptured by visions, which, like hadiths, involve sense experiences, witnessing, face-to-face encounters, and immediacy. Next to the textual corpus of the hadith, visions thus make possible an alternative form of representation of the Prophet in the here and now by providing a nontextual shortcut. Visionary encounters speak of an entirely different temporality, one in which a long-gone past is directly accessible without being mediated by texts or chains of transmitters. Whereas a rupture in the intertextuality of Islamic discourses has been related to the advent of a new Muslim reading public in other contexts,³⁹

the dialogical constitution of contemporary texts also can exceed the sphere of reading and can instead take place by way of the imagination. For Shaykh al-Qusi and some of his followers, the Prophet but also the Prophet's companions, early hadith transmitters, and Sufi leaders are rendered present as direct interlocutors who can teach, answer questions, and bestow blessings. Direct encounters with the Prophet and his descendants by way of the imagination thus supplement the more conventional forms of transmission represented in hadiths. What the imaginary interlocutors do and say is recorded carefully and with detailed attention to every single letter, just as in the hadith literature. While throwing into question linear time and space, dream narratives in some ways mirror the hadith genre, and within Shaykh al-Qusi's group, these similarities authorize them.

Dream visions and waking visions are seen in the present (and always meticulously dated), but they can be both from another time and from outside of time. As the Book of Visions illustrates, the constitutive texts of the Islamic tradition posit different temporalities. This interlinking of different temporalities, which is closely related to a different sense of what is real, imbues the dream vision with an exceptional epistemological value in the eyes of the shaykh and his followers. Moving from the encounter model to the prophecy model, I now turn to visions that more explicitly originate in a timeless realm.

VISION AS PROPHECY: FROM DIVINE INSPIRATION TO REVELATION

Whereas the notion of the inventive genius has been central to Western theories of authorship since at least the 18th century, Shaykh al-Qusi and his followers believe that authorship is not always about individual creativity. Mystical authorship, rather, resembles prophecy, because a text is not produced but received by the author. It is precisely because of this similarity between poetry and prophecy (and because poetry played a central role in pre-Islamic Arabia) that the Prophet Muhammad had to fight off adversaries who tried to devalue the revelation by comparing it to dreams, inventions, and poetry. The Qurءan warns explicitly that, “as for those poets, only those who go astray follow them.”⁴⁰

Muslim scholars aligned with the Aristotelian tradition, such as al-Kindi (d. 873) and al-Ghazali, assumed that although mystics were able to receive divine inspiration, poets only worked with their own skills and knowledge. By contrast, Ibn al-ʿArabi and others influenced by the Neoplatonic tradition praised poetry as being closely related to prophecy. They allowed for the possibility of divinely inspired poets and considered the imagination a kind of messenger capable of communicating truths that lie outside of reason.

Shaykh al-Qusi and his disciples believe that prophetic inspiration is still at work in the 21st century. The shaykh's assistant told me that his shaykh “can just sit down and poetry flows.” This is possible because, as evidenced in a number of visions seen by his followers, the shaykh is the recipient of a form of prophecy or, as will be discussed shortly, even of revelation. Whereas the previous section describes the encounter model as one trope for the coming about of the shaykh's poetry, I now turn to the notion that the shaykh's visionary experiences are not so much a bridging of time but rather are an eruption of a timeless truth into time. Although these two concepts overlap, the prophecy model differs slightly from the model of the encounter, as it allows for unmediated prophetic messages.

As is the case with the encounter model, the shaykh is not alone in claiming that the source of his poetry lies elsewhere. Although some of the disciples would argue that his poetry's beauty proves its divine origins, visions provide a form of evidence that exceeds a mere aesthetic evaluation. Based on their experiences, followers believe that the shaykh's poetry is not created in time but is a materialized copy of a timeless original. In accordance, the coming about of the poetry is portrayed as the shaykh reading a text placed within or set before him. One woman recorded the following dream vision in 1998:

Another narrative in the Book of Visions, told by an accountant and long-standing follower of the shaykh, offers a similar but less computerized explanation for how the shaykh comes to his poetry: Like a number of the visions described earlier, this vision was directly evoked by the shaykh's poetry. As a result of reading the poetry, the dreamer was “honored by a dream vision” (tasharraftu bi-ruءyā). In narrating what he saw, he clarified that the shaykh's writing is not a creation ex nihilo but rather a rewriting, a tracing. Although the shaykh is rewriting what is already written, he diverges from the modern author figure described by Roland Barthes, who “can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.” Despite also being a rewriting, the shaykh's text is understood not as a “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture”⁴¹ but as a direct copy of a divine, timeless original. Sometimes divinely inspired words are shown to the shaykh; other times they are placed into his heart. A member of the group recalled the following dream: “I see in my sleep that poetry is put into Sidi's heart in a language other than Arabic. Then Sidi begins and puts out what has been put into him in the form of poetry.”

The “language other than Arabic” (lugha ghayr al-ʿArabiyya) might be an angelic or divine language or the cryptic language often used by al-Khidr. This language is placed into the shaykh's heart (ulqiya fī qalb Sītdī)—a movement that parallels that of the revelation.⁴²

The notion that when Shaykh al-Qusi writes poetry he is really translating from this language into Arabic mirrors the notion that the Qurءan is eternally contained on the original copy in heaven, the safely preserved tablet (al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ) that materialized in the form of the revealed Qurءan. Whether the shaykh is reading from the original in heaven or whether words are put into his heart, a number of the vision narratives evoke imagery associated with the revelation. Thus, not only do these narratives posit a model of authorship different from the modern author figure, they also enable a different possibility of authorization by mirroring the revelation received by the Prophet Muhammad.

The notion that the shaykh's poetry is not created by him but that it already exists before coming to him also is expressed in visions that describe the followers as already having seen, heard, or read the shaykh's poetry when supposedly hearing it for the first time. Because his poetry is only a material copy of a preexisting original in a timeless elsewhere, the spiritually advanced followers can receive poetry for the shaykh or alongside him. At one gathering, Sharifa told the crowd that al-Khidr dictated two lines of poetry to her during a dream that she had seen in the early morning. In the evening she went to the shaykh to tell him, and he showed her a piece of paper onto which he had written the exact same lines in the afternoon that same day. On another occasion the shaykh read a new poem that contained words we had just heard a few minutes earlier, when Sharifa was recounting a dream of hers. The shaykh interrupted his reading and turned to Sharifa with a smile: “Did I get that right?” Sharifa did not seem surprised and grinned with delight.

By way of these highly performative dream tellings and by deferring to followers such as Sharifa, the shaykh ultimately affirms his relationship to a divine order. Such incidents prove to his followers that not only are Sharifa, al-Khidr, the saints, and the shaykh spiritually connected but also that the shaykh is divinely inspired. Other visions take the claim to prophecy a step further. Sayyid Yahya, a former army general who now owns an interior design company in Cairo, recounted the following vision, which he had seen during the pilgrimage:

Al-Sayyid Yahya's discovery that his shaykh receives not only divine inspiration but a form of revelation was highly significant for him, the shaykh, and the group. He immediately (possibly within the vision itself) informed the shaykh of what he had learned, and a while later, one night during a mawlid, he told the shaykh's followers, who subsequently recorded the vision in writing. A few years later, one Ramadan night, I found myself sitting with the shaykh's followers, drinking tea and skimming through the Book of Visions for the first time. “That one,” Maha said to me while turning the page for me and pointing to the narrative about the descending revelation, “that one was seen by a man who has reached a very high spiritual state. Do you know what it means?” She looked at me, paused for a moment, and then continued. “It means that the shaykh does not compose his poems. They are a form of revelation.”

That Shaykh al-Qusi's followers equate his poetry with a form of revelation does not mean that his imaginary experiences are taken to cancel out the revelation that was received by the Prophet Muhammad. Visions that contradict the revealed shariʿa, the established canonical religious law, are rejected within the Islamic tradition,⁴³

and I never heard or read any such visions from Shaykh al-Qusi or his followers. Nevertheless, the equation of the shaykh's visionary inspiration with revelation is highly significant and would be unsettling for many outside observers. The term “waḥy,” as all central words in the vision narratives, is not randomly chosen but carefully reported. It is a dense signifier and a highly charged term, as it raises the author's authority to a level that comes dangerously close to that of the Prophet himself, for whom the term is generally reserved. Although any shaykh's claim to divine inspiration would be critically viewed by many, even fewer of the Muslims with whom I spoke outside of Shaykh al-Qusi's group and other Sufi circles would accept the analogy drawn between a shaykh's visions and the divine revelation received by the Prophet Muhammad.

As has been argued in studies of other forms of “extra-Qurءanic” or “extrascriptural” revelation, the question of how to define the boundaries around revelation has troubled Muslim scholars for a long time. Different schools disagree on whether the Sunna is itself a kind of revelation. Other troubling genres are the shataḥāt, ecstatic expressions of Sufis, and the ḥadīth qudsī, hadiths in which God speaks in the first person but which are not included in the Qurءan.⁴⁴

The blurrier the lines between revelation (waḥy), divine inspiration (ilhām), and prophecy (nubuwwa), the more dangerous and offensive it becomes to cross them. Dream visions in particular are prone to complicating the boundaries around prophecy and revelation, because dream visions constituted part of the revelation, and according to a hadith,“the dreams of the prophets were revelation.”⁴⁵ As mentioned earlier, the Prophet himself called dream visions the only form of glad tidings that would be left after his death, and he defined them as one of forty-six parts of prophecy. Many of my interlocutors in Cairo, both inside and outside of Shaykh al-Qusi's group, believed that a certain prophetic quality is intrinsic to all dream visions so that a kind of prophecy continues to be accessible to ordinary dreamers at all times.

Muslim reformers, who are suspicious of the dream vision's prophetic potential, argue that even on the rare occasions when dreams foreshadow the future or offer insight into the metaphysical realm of the unknown (al-ghayb), they do so only for the individual dreamer. In line with the psychoanalytic dream model (and often referring to it directly), reformers insist that the dream is intimately linked to the dreamer and never exceeds him or her. Reformers further often distinguish between the Prophet's experience of revelation and the realm of dreams. In doing so they respond to Orientalists' claims that what seemed to come from an elsewhere must have really originated inside the Prophet's head. Maxine Rodinson and Montgomery Watt, for instance, agree in their respective biographies of the Prophet Muhammad that he might have sincerely believed to be the recipient of a message from an elsewhere. However, as both stress, affirming Muhammad's sincerity does not mean that he was right. Rather, the key to the puzzle of where the revelation originated, according to both scholars, is provided by the modern notion of the unconscious. Based on the authority of “modern advances in psychology and psychiatry,” Rodinson concludes that it is the concept of the unconscious that has enabled us to understand the true nature of the so-called revelation.⁴⁶

Watt similarly states that the “modern Westerner” realizes that what seemed to the Prophet to come from “outside himself” really could have come from the unconscious. Muhammad simply might have been a man with a strong “creative imagination.”⁴⁷

By insisting that the revelation clearly was more than a dream or hallucination, reformers concede the Orientalists' assumption that all dreams originate in the unconscious, but distinguish revelation as something different. Their discomfort with dreams thus in part might spring from the Orientalist charges denying the prophecy. Through confining all dreams to the individual level, reformers effectively tame the dream vision's prophetic and political potential. Shaykh al-Qusi's approach to the Islamic tradition, by contrast, in many ways escapes the stamp of Orientalists' and reformers' influences. For the shaykh and his followers, the meaning of dreams and waking visions can exceed the realm of the individual. In the context I have described, vision narratives provide proof, inspiration, and prophetic knowledge to an entire community. Although certain dreams are taken to originate outside of the individual, they are not located outside of the tradition. Their authority, I have suggested, stems at least in part from their complex relationship to the tradition's sacred texts.