64 Journal of Near Eastern Studies Vol. 65 No.

Usuli-Akhbari dispute, which is foreshadowed in The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpre-
this earlier period, would erupt in the sixteenth tation. By John C. Lamoreaux. SUNY Series
century. Drawing such sharp lines in the third/ in Islam. Albany: State University of New
ninth century perhaps oversimplifies what was a York Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 247. $21.95.
fluid, and highly complex, situation. In this book John Lamoreaux intends to put
Secondly, the selection of specific hadiths and dream interpretation on the Islamicist’s map, and
the significance of their texts are explained more he does. Despite increasing interest in the phe-
in terms of the internal development of the Imami nomenon of dreams in the Islamic tradition in
community and their relationship with other Shiºi recent years, dream interpretation per se has re-
factions and not so much in terms of the overall ceived relatively little attention. This is presum-
community’s dialectical engagements with the ably due, in part, to the stultifying nature of most
Sunni majority. And there were many of these (but not all) of the content of the standard works
Sunni-Shiºi engagements, particularly in the third/ on dream interpretation (taºbir); lists running to
ninth century, as each community struggled to hundreds of pages of statements such as “If you
define the parameters of communal identity, in speak to a frog [in a dream], you will obtain
large measure in conscious opposition to the dominion” pall quickly, no matter how cleverly
other. The issue of legitimate leadership loomed organized. But this “science” was no minor or
large in these dialectics, particularly in the anx- marginal phenomenon in classical Islamic culture,
ious period of the Lesser Occultation. Thus the as Lamoreaux shows elegantly and convincingly
Basaªir’s emphasis on the thaumaturgic knowl- in this investigation of its birth and evolution
edge of the Imam could be read as a conscious through the first four Islamic centuries.
attempt at one-upmanship with regard to the ex- The book is tightly structured, and both in-
tensive knowledge, albeit of a more pedestrian formation and arguments are lucidly presented.
variety, attributed particularly to Abu Bakr and After an introduction posing the major questions
ºUmar, the first two caliphs of the Sunnis. Since to be answered, the first chapter charts the de-
miraculous knowledge was restricted to the velopment of an indigenous Arabic-Islamic tra-
Imams, these reports also emphasize their kin- dition of dream interpretation, relying on a later
ship with the Prophet through ºAli and the spe- bibliographical reference to select four authors
cial nature of this kinship, thus seeking to erode (or authorities) for special consideration. The first
the legitimacy of the first three Rashidun caliphs, of these is the famous Ibn Sirin (d. 110/728),
who could at best claim only close companion- who in subsequent centuries came to be regarded
ship to Muhammad (suhba). These debates would as the authority on dreams and whose name was
continue well through the late Middle Ages, as attached to large numbers of pseudepigraphs.
our sources show, since the question of legiti- While dismissing the notion that Ibn Sirin actu-
mate leadership continued to occupy the minds ally wrote a book on dreams, Lamoreaux argues
of scholars. with some cogency that his reputation as an
These observations only highlight the fruit- authority developed early, probably with some
ful nature of Newman’s line of inquiry, since it basis in actual reality. The second author, al-
offers many new insights and encourages further Kirmani (late second/eighth century?) is obscure
scholarly investigation along the same lines. and his book is lost, and it is the third, Ibn Qu-
Close, highly contextualized reading of hadith tayba (d. 276/889), who offers us our first extant
literature is widely acknowledged as a very treatise; the fourth, from a century later, was com-
effective way to decipher the past meaningfully; posed by the amir of Sijistan, Khalaf b. Ahmad
Newman convinces us that this is true. al-Sijistani (d. 399/1008).
Lamoreaux finds no evidence in any of these
Asma Afsaruddin works of “foreign” influence or, more specifi-
cally, that of the Arabic translation of Artemi-
University of Notre Dame
dorus, the premier Greek interpreter of dreams,
by Hunayn b. Ishaq (d. 264/877). On this basis,
he pictures the initial growth of the Arabic tradi-
January 2006 Book Reviews 65

tion as both indigenous and homogeneous, with authority (as a form of inspiration or even proph-
an anecdotal base undergoing gradual formali- ecy, justified as such by a number of prophetic
zation, until the fourth/tenth century, when access hadith), its “logic” (essentially, loose analogies),
to outside sources, coupled with the general intel- and its “boundaries” (as a genre). As for content,
lectual ferment of the time, led to a “fracturing” it is only here in his book that Lamoreaux offers
of this tradition, illustrated in chap. 2 by four much in the way of a sampling, choosing such
extant fifth/eleventh-century works. In order to categories as (dreams of ) frogs, the planets, and
highlight their competing approaches, Lamoreaux carpenters to compare different works and thus
matches these four up, in rather Procrustean to support his conclusion that the tradition was
fashion, with Marshall Hodgson’s well-known intensely conservative and not particularly con-
cultural categories of “Shariºah-minded” scholar ducive to “creativity.” One might ask, however,
(the Tunisian al-Qayrawani), littérateur (the Khur- whether something that was regarded as a science,
asanian al-Dinawari), Sufi (the Khurasanian al- after all, could be expected not to see conserva-
Kharkushi), and philosopher (Ibn Sina). This neat tion of “knowledge” as its primary task. And the
categorization is perhaps rendered a bit fuzzy by question of the sources of individual interpreta-
the fact that al-Kharkushi actually seems to have tions is left aside, presumably as lost in the mists
plagiarized al-Dinawari, abridging his text and of the earlier indigenous tradition—one regarded
cutting out explicit references to non-Islamic as indigenous both because of its homogeneity
sources or concepts, and in his religious orienta- and its lack of appeal to Artemidorus. But no-
tion al-Kharkushi was actually quite close to al- where is it made clear whether (as seems to be
Qayrawani, except for, as Lamoreaux points out, implied) the interpretations offered by the earli-
his special interest in the dreams of Sufis. Also est sources for individual dreams are completely
troublesome for Lamoreaux’s tidy lineup of two unrelated to what we find in Artemidorus, and
sets of four texts each is the fact that al-Sijistani, this question becomes more pressing when we
from the first group, would actually seem on are offered the example of dreams of the planets
chronological grounds to fit better with the sec- (“Venus is the king’s wife, Mercury is his
ond, which raises some questions about the pat- scribe . . .”) whose background is anything but
tern of development of the genre Lamoreaux obscure and must be roughly paralleled in Ar-
sketches. temidorus—whom, however, Lamoreaux does
As one might expect, Ibn Sina stands apart in not cite.
important ways from all the others. Heavily de- Chap. 4, “Dream Interpretation and Ortho-
pendent on Artemidorus for the body of his work, doxy,” brings to the fore a theme that runs
and downplaying to the point of effacement any- through the entire book. Even in his introduction
thing explicitly Islamic, he also includes an ex- Lamoreaux is concerned not only to establish that
tremely interesting philosophical introduction on dream interpretation was a major component of
the dream process, which deserves a study of its Islamic culture from early on, but also to insist
own, in the context of the wider Islamic philo- that it was eminently respectable, its chief prac-
sophical tradition. Perhaps appropriately, if a bit titioners being, in fact, the ºulamaª, who viewed
disappointingly, Lamoreaux contents himself with it as a “sharºi” science. Evidence to support this
a cursory summary of this passage in the course assertion is not hard to come by, and Lamoreaux
of describing the entire work, and it does seem marshals it from Qurªan, hadith, transmission pat-
to be true, as he argues, that Ibn Sina’s work terns of works on the subject, the famous diary
turned out to be quite marginal to the later tradi- of the fifth/eleventh-century Ibn al-Bannaª, and
tion of dream interpretation, at least as a mono- (a bit oddly) discussions by the Ikhwan al-Safaª
graphic genre. in the fourth/tenth century and Ibn Khaldun in
In his remaining three chapters, Lamoreaux the eighth/fourteenth. There is a distinct aura of
addresses larger questions to the tradition as a defensiveness about the discussion here, eluci-
whole that he sketched in the first two. Chap. 3, dated only in part by the author’s pointing out
entitled “Homogeneity and Imitation,” looks first at the end of the chapter the contrast between
at its “contours”: its self-proclaimed basis for Muslim acceptance and embrace of dream
66 Journal of Near Eastern Studies Vol. 65 No. 1

interpretation and the earlier earnest rejection of acceptable to any monotheist. Lack of evidence
it by the Christianity of Late Antiquity. If, as prevents Lamoreaux from getting very far in
seems likely, modern attitudes are also on La- explaining an apparent turnaround in Christian
moreaux’s mind, he should take comfort from attitudes toward dream interpretation in general,
the famous statement, attributed to Saul Lieber- but there is still much more left to do—as he in-
man, that “Nonsense is nonsense, but the history dicates in the remainder of this chapter, pointing
of nonsense is scholarship.” to various traditions (Armenians, Jews, etc.) not
Christianity is the subject of chap. 5, which yet adequately investigated.
first gives an overview of Christian antagonism In fact there is still plenty to do even strictly
to dream interpretation in the pre-Islamic period within the Arabic-Islamic tradition, as becomes
and then analyzes two fourth/tenth-century Chris- clear from the book’s appendix, which lists sixty-
tian dream books, one in Greek (“Achmet”) and three dream books altogether, extant and not, that
the other in Arabic (Bar Bahlul), both under can either certainly or likely be dated before about
heavy influence from the Arabic-Islamic tradi- 500/1106; Lamoreaux has done some useful but
tion. Lamoreaux shows that the former, a rather really only preliminary work identifying these
enigmatic text whose frame story introduces a authors and titles. There also remains the largely
systematic report on the interpretations of Indians, unstudied, vast corpus of Arabic works on the
Persians, and Egyptians, owes to the Arabic tra- subject from later times, down almost to the
dition not only much of its “Indian” material but present. But what we do have now, thanks to
also the ordering of topics throughout; it is also this study, is an excellent overview of the first
only the “Indian” section that includes explicitly four centuries of Islam, highlighting the relevant
Christian material. Further elucidation of this issues and addressing them deftly.
peculiar situation is provided by Maria Mavroudi, Lamoreaux’s translations very occasionally go
whose revised Harvard dissertation, entitled A astray; one quoted poem (p. 97) refers to death
Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The (himam), not doves (hamam), and al-Dinawari’s
Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources Thimar al-uns fi tashbihat al-furs is not (p. 60)
(Leiden, 2002), was published roughly simulta- about “metaphors used to describe Persians” but
neously with Lamoreaux’s book. Mavroudi points rather about standard metaphors in the Persian
out that in Byzantine Greek usage “Indian” could language (as opposed to those standard in Ara-
easily refer to the Eastern Christians, although it bic). Transliterations include a few extra, erro-
is difficult to know where to take the investiga- neous macrons, and there are occasional typos in
tion beyond that, and neither Lamoreaux nor the English. On the whole, however, this book is
Mavroudi can make much headway with the remarkably clean, as well as handsome, in addi-
“Persian” and “Egyptian” material, although tion to being a valuable work of scholarship.
Mavroudi has good arguments for its immediate
source being Arabic. More generally, her com- Everett K. Rowson
parison of “Achmet” to a number of Arabic dream
New York University
books (including Ibn Qutayba and al-Dinawari,
as well as several later ones) results in conclu-
sions that complement Lamoreaux’s—a happy
outcome to what appears to be one of those Striving for Divine Union: Spiritual Exercises
stereotypical academic nightmares (speaking of for Suhrawardi Suf is. By Qamar-ul Huda .
dreams). The two books can profitably be read London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon,
in tandem. 2003. Pp. xiii + 221 + 1 pl. $114.95.
Mavroudi has little to say about Bar Bahlul, Striving for Divine Union is the product of
but Lamoreaux makes the important point that Qamar-ul Huda’s in-depth reading of early and
his dream manual (actually a chapter in a much contemporary texts on the history and practices
more diffuse work Lamoreaux labels an “alma- of the Suhrawardi Sufi tariqa. The work’s sub-
nac”) amounts to an abridgment of that of Ibn title, Spiritual Exercises for Suhrawardi Suf is,
Qutayba, with a careful de-Islamicizing that aims suggests that Huda’s main concern is practice.
less at Christianizing than at producing a text In fact, most of the book deals with the founda-

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