Dream of the Shah

Iraj E. Ghoochani

This essay serves as a supplementary reflection on my dissertation titled Bābā Āb Dād: The Phenomenology of Sainthood in the Culture of Dreams in Kurdistan, with an Emphasis on the Sufis of the Qāderie Brotherhood (Esmaeilpour Ghoochani, Iraj, 2017). (URL: https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21528/) This work was completed at LMU München, Faculty of Philosophy, Science Theory, and Religious Studies. For reference, when I mention “dissertation” in this essay, I am referring to this specific document.

Abstract

This essay is about the rivalry between kings and poets within Persianate societies, illustrating the tension between the “word of power” held by rulers and the “power of words” wielded by poets. It posits that the nature of dreams differs significantly between members of the elite and ordinary subjects, reflecting their respective positions within the social hierarchy. Through an exploration of dreams, it asserts that the narratives of kings are imbued with authority and political significance, while those of ordinary individuals are bound by societal norms, often limiting their expression and interpretation. Drawing from hagiographical and ethnographical material, the essay contextualizes dreams as mirrors of the symbolic order, revealing how these narratives are homologous to the dreamer’s social identity. By examining the Kurdish dream culture, the study highlights the interplay between individual aspirations and cultural frameworks, illustrating that dreams serve as both personal expressions and reflections of broader societal constructs. Ultimately, the essay contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex role that dreams play in shaping identity and reinforcing social hierarchies within Persianate and Kurdish contexts.

Introduction: From the Garden of Night-tales to the Desert of Dream (ze bāgh-i gheṣe be dasht-I khāb)

Dreams hold a significant place in Islamic culture, often described as central to the spiritual and social fabric of Muslim societies. Iain R. Edgar emphasizes this in his observation that “Islam has the largest night dream culture in the world today” (Edgar, p. 1). Among the regions contributing to this rich tradition, Iran occupies a pivotal role. This prominence is intertwined with the legacy of Ibn-i Sirin, widely regarded as the founder of the Muslim tradition of dream interpretation. Interestingly, Ibn-i Sirin was the son of an Iranian captive taken during the Muslim conquest of the Persian Empire.

His influence endures today, as his dream manual remains a cornerstone of dream interpretation in Iran and Kurdistan. However, the origins of this manual are shrouded in ambiguity; it is likely a product of collective memory rather than his own authorship (Lamoreaux, p. 19). Despite this, Ibn-i Sirin’s name resonates strongly across Kurdish oral traditions. During my research into the Kurdish culture of dreams, every interviewee unequivocally identified Ibn-i Sirin as a “Kurd” (Esmaeilpour Ghoochani, 2017). This perception highlights the unique way his historical persona has been adapted to fit the region’s narrative needs.

Kurdish oral culture, deeply rooted in pre-Islamic traditions, often relied on archetypal figures to encapsulate and transmit its vast troves of lore. Ibn-i Sirin, as a historical figure from early Islam, proved an ideal vessel for preserving and conveying this legacy. While his actual authorship of a dream manual remains uncertain, his role as a symbolic figure in the Kurdish tradition underscores the interplay between oral history and cultural identity.

Dream Narratives in Persianate Societies

Dreams occupy a vital role in Islamic culture, deeply intertwined with oral and literary traditions. Ibn-i Sirin, the son of an Iranian captive, stands as a central figure in this tradition. His name is associated with the most influential dream manual in the Islamic world, though the manual itself is likely a product of oral transmission rather than his own writings (Lamoreaux, p. 19). The oral nature of Kurdish culture, in particular, shaped the transmission of his lore, embedding Ibn-i Sirin as an archetypal figure whose legacy continues to influence dream interpretation in the region.

The uniformity of early Muslim dream traditions, as described by Lamoreaux, highlights their enduring consistency. For example, the interpretation of symbols such as a frog has remained unchanged from the second to the fifth centuries A.H. and across vast regions, from North Africa to Iran (Lamoreaux, p. 104). This homogeneity suggests that the written texts of dream manuals are reflections of a robust oral tradition that preceded and paralleled literary documentation.

Night dreams and oral tales share profound connections, especially in Kurdish contexts, where dreams frequently feature as pivotal elements in storytelling. Both forms rely heavily on associative symbolism and occur in nocturnal settings, emphasizing their mutual role in cultural expression. Dreams often transcend the boundaries of day-to-day experiences, becoming precursors to poetic forms and creative intuitions. Annemarie Schimmel, a scholar of Sufi literature, highlights how dreams and tales in Persian and related literatures, such as Kurdish, Urdu, and Turkish, are deeply intertwined. She suggests that storytelling can transport listeners into a dream-like state, seamlessly blending the boundaries between narrative and dream (Schimmel, pp. 298–299).

This interplay is exemplified in iconic works like 1001 Nights and the tales of Scheherazade, where narratives extend into dream-like continuations, guiding the audience into a liminal space of imagination and slumber. The parallel between tales and dreams underscores their shared function as vessels for exploring subconscious realms and transcending linguistic and cultural boundaries.

The central premise of this article is that in oral cultures such as Kurdistan, the ontological foundations of dreams and stories are intrinsically linked. This shared basis offers valuable insights into the narrative structures of Kurdish prophesying dreams, hagiographies, and folk stories. A fascinating connection emerges between the concept of fate and the written word, evident in linguistic parallels such as the Persian sarnevesht and the Kurdish chārehnousa, both meaning “written fate (on the face or head).” This linkage resonates with Islamic philosophy, which delves into the relationship between fate (ghaḍā) and the written word (maktoub). While this philosophical perspective is only briefly addressed here, its relevance to the discussion is significant.

A key focus now is how societal hierarchies and social order are mirrored in dream narratives, particularly those involving kings or Sultans. These “royal” dreams are explored within the framework of Max Weber’s concept of sultanism. In his analysis of patrimonialism, Weber identifies sultanism as a form of administration characterized by extreme personal authority and control, leading to a system that is essentially arbitrary and often violent (Weber, 1922, p. 175). Weber’s choice to use the Arabic term “Sultan” reflects its historical roots, as this mode of governance finds its archetypal expression in the Near East (Chehabi & Linz, 1998, p. 6).

Dreams involving kings or Sultans thus serve as reflections of these deeply rooted societal structures, revealing the dynamics of power and authority within oral narratives. The interplay between fate, authority, and narrative underscores the profound connections between cultural traditions, philosophical concepts, and social hierarchies in Persianate states.

Inalcik also states this:

What Max Weber meant by Sultanism was originally derived not from Islamic precepts but from the caliphal state organization, which owed its basic philosophy and structure to the Byzantine and Sassanian heritage. This Iranian state tradition was transmitted to the Ottomans through native bureaucrats and the literary activity of the Iranian converts who translated Sassanian advice literature into Arabic. (Inalcik: 22)

This literary activity appears to exist in a symbiotic, if not causal, relationship with social hierarchy. Friedrich Engels, in his seminal work Anti-Dühring (1878), observed a causal link between “administrative regulations” and the emergence of “administrative despotism,” underscoring the interconnectedness of societal structures and governance with cultural expressions.

Inalcik continues with a synopsis of Tansar-nāme, a royal advice-letter from Sassanian times that is worth including here because it portrays the general social pyramid of a Persianate society as well as its social castes:

Man are divided into four estates…and at their head is the king. The first estate is that of the clergy…the second estate is that of military… the third estate is that of the scribes… the fourth estate is known as that of the artisans, and comprises tillers of land and herders of cattle and merchants and others who earn their living by trade…Assuredly there shall be no passing from one to another unless in the character of one of us outstanding capacity is found… The King of kings… kept each man in his own station and forbade any to to meddle with a calling other than that for which it had pleased God…to create him. He laid commands moreover on the heads of the four estates…All were concerned with their means of livelihood and their own affairs, and did not constrain kings to this by evil devices and acts of rebellion…The commands given by the King of kings for occupying with their own tasks and restraining them from those of others are for the stability of the world and the order of the affairs of men… He has set a chief over each estate and after him a trusty inspector to investigate their revenues. The King of kings has issued a decree to exalt and ennoble their noble families rank …By it he has established a visible and general distinction between men of noble birth and common people with regard to horses and clothes, houses and gardens, women and servants…(Inalcik: 22-23).

In this work, this pyramid, which is sharply peaked, has been considered as a highly polarized constellation of just two simple estates: the king and his subjects (roʿāyāʾ). All other castes, such as the clergy, sheikhs, and poets, are mostly like some starry points that fill the big empty space that exists between the king’s subjects in an extremely vast but leveled substrate of the pyramid and the king as its unreachable peak. The subjects are ‘leveled’ for similar reasons that Engels wrote in ‘Anti-Dühring.’:

The chiefs necessarily become the oppressors of the peoples, and intensify their oppression up to the point at which inequality, carried to the utmost extreme, again changes into its opposite, becomes the cause of equality: before the despot all are equal — equally ciphers. (Engels: 153)

This discussion examines Sultanism as an extreme form of patrimonialism and its enduring yet concealed connections to traditional systems of governance in the region, such as gerontocracy and patriarchy. These hidden continuities are revealed in historical narratives about the dreams of Sultans, where rulers frequently seek the guidance of wise mentors to interpret their visions accurately.

The analysis also highlights a fascinating parallel: the dual sovereignty of the Sultan as a despotic ruler and the poet as a revolutionary figure: One owns the language of power and the other one the power of language. This connection is vividly illustrated in the story of Nāli, the most renowned Kurdish poet of the Sorāni dialect, spoken widely in Sanandaj. The dynamic between the king and the poet underscores the interplay between political and poetical authority—between the domain of deeds and the realm of words (cf. Koschorke & Kaminskij, p. 12). This duality fosters a unique form of hermeneutics, where the condensed power of language bridges the worlds of politics and poetry, allowing them to coexist in a symbiotic relationship.

This article seeks to redefine the categorization of Oriental dreams by incorporating the social hierarchy and class of the dreamer. While the conclusions are based on “inductive inference” and remain subject to further proof, the emerging framework broadly identifies two categories of dreams:

1. The subjective dreams of the king/Sultan, and
2. The dreams of the king’s subjects.

Nāli: A subject in love with Queen

عومـرێکـی درێـــژە بەخەیاڵی سەری سوڵفـــت

سەودا و پەرێشانــــم و، ســـەودایـەکی خــــاوە

ʿomrbeki darbeyja bi Khiyāli sar-i zolfat

Soudā wa parishanam wa soudayi ki Khāwa

L et my life drift away, lost in the dream of your flowing tress,

I am enthralled, disheveled—a dreamer, consumed by this tender madness.

—Nāli

Here, Nāli has created a beautiful play on words, linking his unstable and melancholic state of mind with the disheveled state of his beloved’s hair. He also connects the black color of her hair with the word “soudā,” which means enamored, insane, melancholic, and also reminds one of the word “sawād”, or darkness. All of these wordplays are linked to a “night dream” and “sleep,” which are referred to by a single word in Kurdish: Khaw.

Kurdish folk tales exhibit many parallels with the folk traditions of other Iranian cultures, including those of Luristan, Azerbaijan, Gilan, and Mazanderan. Although most Kurds live in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and are not directly associated with Iran, their language is Iranian, and their cultural affinities align more closely with Persian traditions than with Arab or Turkish influences, particularly in the realm of folklore (Tofiq, p. 5). Kurdish scholar Iraj Bahrami underscores this connection, asserting that an understanding of Persian poetry is indispensable for appreciating Kurdish poetry (Bahrami, p. 178). It is important to note, however, that the narrative forms found in Persian folk tales are not unique to Kurdish culture. Instead, the bureaucratic literature of the central Persianate state has historically interconnected various folkloric traditions across Persianate societies, known collectively as adabiyat-i ‘amiane (Chipak, p. 77).

Conversely, the influence of Kurdish oral literature on Persian literary traditions is noteworthy. For example, in the first chapter of the dissertation, the Kurdish story of Shirin and Farhad was shown to have left an indelible mark on one of the most esteemed works of Persian classical literature. This illustrates the rich exchange of narratives between these interconnected cultures.

Dreams play a pivotal role in Kurdish storytelling. It is exceptionally rare to encounter a Kurdish narrative in which dreams do not serve as a decisive element. The functional use of dreams as a narrative device has been explored in the dissertation through an anthological review of classical stories, including the prophet’s nightly ascension (miʿrāj). However, this narrational strategy is not limited to classical tales; as we will observe, it also reemerges in modern reinterpretations of the story of Shirin and Farhad, showcasing the enduring significance of dreams in Kurdish cultural expression.

Nāli (1797–1855), a renowned Kurdish poet, is credited with adapting the traditional Persian poetic meters to the southern Sorani dialect of Kurdish, which is widely spoken in Sanandaj. He is celebrated as the founder of cultivated poetry in Sorani and has “contributed immensely to making Sorani the literary language of southern Kurdistan, encompassing much of present-day Iraq and the adjacent districts of Iran” (Encyclopedia Iranica, Nāli). Nāli lived during the reign of Khosro Khan Ardalan, ruler of Kurdistan, and his poetry reflects the vibrant cultural and political milieu of the time.

Nāli is also noted for composing what is believed to be the first radical erotic poem in Kurdish literature. The central figure of desire in this poem is Mastoure Ardalān (1805–1848), a princess, the wife of Khosro Khan, and the most famous Kurdish poetess of her time. In this work, Nāli vividly describes a dream in which he experiences an intimate encounter with Mastoure, employing a richly symbolic and poetic language to narrate the affair. Again the same triangle of key personalities that was in the story of Shirin and Farhad is repeated here. khosro khān-i Ardalān is comparable to the Khosro and the role of Nalī is comparable to Farhad as an ordinary person who comes from a lower class but is so brave and bold to express his love for the wife of the Khosro the king: Shirin/Mastoureh.

Despite Nāli’s close relationships with the princes of Kurdish principalities, such as those of Ardalan in Persia and Baban (see Encyclopedia Iranica), he himself was not of royal blood, and little is definitively known about his familial origins. His bold artistic endeavor, addressing such a sensitive subject, was a risky social and literary act that could have invited severe repercussions, particularly revenge or punishment from the ruling elite. However, Nāli avoided such consequences by framing the episode as a dream, leveraging the cultural and religious understanding that dreams are beyond one’s control.

In Muslim societies, dreams hold a special place, often considered a realm where sinful scenes or actions can be “seen” or “committed” without moral culpability. This societal tolerance for the contents of dreams provided Nāli with a protective pretext, allowing him to push artistic and cultural boundaries in ways that might otherwise have been unacceptable (refer to appendix of my dissertation^[1]).

In Kurdish literature, the pivotal role of dreams persists well into the modern era, encompassing a wide range of functions, including the strategic use employed by Nāli to bypass the societal norms upheld by “the big Other” and avoid the punishment of a despotic ruler. This “big Other,” an external authority that enforces societal norms, is effectively realized in the figure of a despot. Similarly, in Freudian terms, the dream’s essential function is to navigate the super-ego by allowing repressed desires to surface in a disguised form within a dream narrative or poem. What is particularly striking in Nāli’s poem is how its structure aligns with Freud’s Oedipal triangle. The narrative revolves around three fundamental agents: the father (the king or “name of the Father”), the mother (the queen or the alluring object of desire, often symbolized by figures like Shirin), and the desiring subject (Nāli or Farhad). This configuration underscores the deep psychological and narrative underpinnings of the story.

Nāli’s conscious use of the dream-work as a narrative strategy reveals a sophisticated transplantation of the dream’s unconscious mechanisms into the realms of poetic and political discourse. By framing his poem as a dream, Nāli mirrored the unconscious processes of a night dream in his art, allowing him to express desires that would otherwise be socially or politically unacceptable. This deliberate act of creative subversion exemplifies how a poet can navigate and challenge repressive norms.

The strategy Nāli employed finds parallels in the broader Iranian literary tradition, which is rich in techniques for circumventing censorship and repression. A notable example is Kellile wa Demene, an ancient Iranian-Indian collection of tales, akin to 1001 Nights, where political commentary is cleverly “mouthed” by mute animals (ḥeywānāt-i zabānbaste). By presenting political discourse as innocuous, fabulous anecdotes, these works effectively deflect scrutiny while preserving their subversive messages. Nāli’s usage of the dream as a vehicle for artistic and political expression stands as a uniquely Kurdish adaptation of this timeless strategy.

Nāli’s poetry is notably influenced by the style, semiotics, and hermeneutics of the Persian poet Hafiz. Despite Hafiz’s reputation as a counter-culture poet (Hāfizi malāmati), Nāli diverges from Hafiz’s methods in a significant way. While Hafiz employed bilateral opposite meanings—‘primal words’—or voiced his dissent through the perspectives of marginalized religious minorities, he never utilized the strategy Nāli adopted. Instead, Hafiz’s subtle insubordination toward orthodox religion and authority was woven into complex layers of symbolism.

In contrast, Nāli’s use of a dream as a narrative pretext to construct a subversive discourse highlights the elevated role dreams occupy in Kurdish culture. This strategy, which allowed Nāli to express repressed desires or rebellion without overtly confronting societal norms, underscores the authoritative position of dreams among the Kurds. While the societal function of dream narratives is particularly prominent among Kurds in Iran, the broader Iranian linguistic tradition is marked by the use of primal words. This linguistic feature reflects the philosophical roots of the Iranian and Islamic “philosophy of meaning,” where words are seen as Decalogue, divine decrees, or commands from an absolute source, such as a ruler in communion with the occult (gheyb) and the absolute (moṭlagh).

This sense of absoluteness inherently generates its opposite—resistance—within the subjective consciousness of those bound by the language. This resistance often pushes language into a state of Ausstand—a strike-state of meaning—where the speaker’s true intent remains obscured, shrouded in ambiguity. Nāli exemplifies this linguistic duality in his famed Qasidah of the Wet Dream (ghasideyi ʾiḥtelāmiyah), where he boldly and transparently transfers the function of dream-work onto the narrative of a dream—one that he likely never experienced. By framing the poem around a wet dream, a culturally strategic choice, he circumvented societal blame or punishment under Islamic shariʿah, as wet dreams are involuntary and thus not considered sinful.

This calculated use of the wet dream to depict carnal desire and a symbolic relationship with the “mother” figure (the queen) illustrates the poet’s rebellious intentions camouflaged within the safety of dream narration. Moreover, as noted earlier, the capacity for dual interpretations—where one narrative simultaneously suggests compliance and dissent—is a hallmark of Iranian languages. This linguistic trait allows speakers to craft subversive statements while avoiding retribution, leveraging the creative and oppositional potential inherent in the language itself.

The concept of “primal words” inherently carries an element of rebellion, pointing to a “deferred signification” (in a Derridean sense). This deferral suggests a secondary intention within the word—one that stands in stark opposition to its conventional meaning. This phenomenon reflects the dual identity of intention and expression, or the distinction between the writer’s subjective intent (the internal, mental intention behind their words) and the act of writing itself (cf. Bornedal, p. 21). The latter, like any communicative act, requires a reflective “Other,” whose tolerance and interpretative capacity inherently constrain what is written.

In the realm of “primal words,” this secondary intention emerges as a silent interplay between the writer’s subjective mental life and the “big Other,” the external authority or societal norms that govern discourse. This interplay aligns with Lacan’s notion of the unconscious—not as an inaccessible realm but as an integral part of our everyday language, manifesting in the automated forms and clichés of daily speech. Lacan’s concept frames unconsciousness as a transparent camouflage for the second intention, embedded within the discourse of the Other.

To illustrate this further, it is useful to revisit Levi-Strauss’s definition of the unconscious. His framework situates unconsciousness as a dynamic system of symbols and structures that operate within, rather than beyond, the reach of their agents. By drawing on these insights, we can better understand how “primal words” function as a site of subversion, allowing suppressed or secondary meanings to surface within the confines of conventional language and societal norms.

What is called unconsciousness is merely an empty space in which the ‘symbolic function’^[2] achieves autonomy” that is to say a space where “symbols are more real than what they symbolize”( Roudinesco, 1999: 211)

These built-in automated facilities are the effects of the way that the symbolic order^[3] ( or ‘order of culture’ to speak more anthropologically) has been organized, that is, the language has inherited these features from the symbolic order because the ‘symbolic’ itself is nothing more than a language-mediated ‘order of culture’. Then it is through this features that the law can be interpreted differently. The effect of this interpretability (ghābeliyat-i taʾwil) , is to be seen in many stories of 1001 nights and other Oriental fables (including Iranian and Kurdish) and also in the historical hagiographies written for the early caliphs of Islam (see: Ahmadvand, 2008), in which the appliance of shariah or the law of orthodox Islam -which is supposed to be directive and unchangeable- is itself a function of a utilitarian reading of the law by a despotic king or ruler (ḥākim, a word that stands both for a ruler and a judge: A non-accidental coincidence). Conversely, there always remains the possibility for a person who has his head on the headman’s table open to bring the ruler into laugh with a joke or an anecdote and become forgiven of his trespasses^[4]. The story of Shahrzad is itself a story of a woman who escaped her bad fortune by postponing this fortune for a night by narrating fabulous entertaining stories for 1001 nights. In our case, there was possibility for Nāli to portray obscene erotic scenes with the wife of the ruler and meanwhile stay free of punishment because all that he has written was what he had seen innocently in a dream on which he had no control.

As stated, this creative use of dream narrative for a conscious use of ‘dream-word’ in the day-time by a Kurdish author, implicitly reflects the authoritative importance of the dreams among the Kurds. No wonder that both the first Kurdish short story la khaw maw (in my dream) (See Safariyan & Sajadi: 87) and the first modern poem in Kurdish literature khow-i bardīnah^[5] (stone dream) are related with dreams.

According to these accounts, it is sensible to have a short review on those oral narratives in Kurdistan which have a lot in common and coincidence with the Kurdish dream narratives. This coincidence comes from this fact that narrating a dream, as an act of speech, is rooted in the oral culture but meanwhile and reversely, it could also serve as a root by providing the oral culture new food especially when a dream becomes ‘true’^[6](rāst dar ke). Every time that a dream bring itself into fruition a big amount of spectacular sayings would arouse around it and everyone tries to add some anecdotic details to it. In every renarration of the dream-story it becomes a little bit spiced up but meanwhile refined and constructed. This construction outlines the way that the dream is discharged from the world of dreams (ālam ol-aḥlām) to the world of reality. That is there is a common and collective intention to tie a dream successfully to the events of the daylight. Thus, more generally, a dream is a kind of prophecy or sign (ayat) both ‘from’ and ‘of’ the other side thrown to the real world. The normative access to this dream or sign is conditioned via a tradition and signification system in which a dream should be narrated and interpreted. Every sign is restricted to its possible meaning arranged in the Islamic dream manuals (above all the book of Ibn-i Sirin) as a table of signification. But notwithstanding this directive straight system of signification, the dream’s potential for authenticity does not lie absolutely in the dream itself (In its elements and their inner potential for being fit in a correct narrative form and so on..) but the dreamer (his/her social status, age and so on..) is the most determining criterion for the truth-value of a dream. For example and as we will see through several examples, a dream of a despot ruler is always ‘authentic’ in this sense that it is always ‘interpretable’ because it comes out from the lips of the ‘absolute’ that is from the domain of all possibilities and hence they do not need to follow the suit of a former forms of narrativity. On the other hand, narrating an out-of-genre dream narrative by a normal subject entails a lot of information that is in a reciprocal relation with its authenticity or probability^[7]. Then in a Persianate context, it is of highest importance to ask who has seen the dream?

The success of a dream for consigning itself to history and being re-narrated and circulated among the people is strictly dependant on the status of its dreamer. In a reverse way, whenever a dream becomes ‘true’ that is becomes realized in the same way that was seen or interpreted through a dream, it abruptly brings a large status for the one who has dreamt it. The case of children is exceptional because their spirit is still not contaminated with the worldly matters as the social status. These two, the truth value of a dream and the social status of its dreamer, are strictly related to each other. The lesser the probability of a dream to become true, the higher is -or would be- the status of its dreamer and in some extreme cases it would be taken as a miracle (khāregh-i ʿādat) or an extraordinary occurrence (vāggheʿi) and would find its place in the body of oral stories as a seed that would grow and spice up in many different details and through the process of its circulation (See the miracle of Karjou in the film #1^[8]) .

Conversely, when someone claimed of being in contact with divinity such as what happens in a revelation or ascension he/she might be asked for a miracle as prove:

But they say, “[The revelation is but] a mixture of false dreams اضغاث الاحلام ; rather, he has invented it; rather, he is a poet. So let him bring us a sign just as the previous [messengers] were sent [with miracles](Quran, 21:5).

As we will see in the coming passages hearing revelation and saying poetry as well as seeing false dreams اضغاث الاحلام and doing miracles are issues that usually appear together in hagiographies and stories told in the oral culture.

Narrating a dream and narrating a story in an oral culture are both based on a transaction of meanings between people who are engaged in the production of those meanings. Then alike to what Geertz has argued, “culture is not something imposed on people, but it is created and re-created through their involvement in social relationships and through social interaction^[9]”.

In the process of circulation and re-narration of the new dream-story, old and new will fuse together into an indissoluble unity in a way characteristic of 1001 nights or every oral literature with an ambiguous origin. It is rather a process of evolution that covers bands of centuries and sometimes reappears again in its very arrangement in the modern era as like the reappearance of the so called Oedipal triangle between the king (Khosro), Shirin and Farhād in the story of Nāli. Through this general amalgamation of every new dream story and the old similar stories in an oral culture like Kurdish, ‘dream’ and ‘story’ both find the same ontological basis for their existence. This common ontological basis leads us to a study of the Kurdish oral literature and folk stories as the main resources and models for structural layout of the Kurdish dream-stories^[10].

What is common between the folk stories and dreams, in fact, is the (story)teller who is not usually a literary person and belongs in the most cases to the lower social strata: to the common people. (cf. Bakhtin, 1984: 191-2) just like those who usually commit a miraculous deed or khawārigh (self- torturing ritual)in the convents (see also van Bruinessen: 309 ff.). Further studies of stories in the religious books and religious dreams will reveal that how these two (khawārigh and dream) are congener.

This kind of text analysis of the religious books would be not so far from ethnography because to do ethnography is a form of literary criticism “like reading a manuscript”^[11] (Geertz 1973, 10). Here we make an ‘interpretation of cultures’ out from the ‘interpretation of dreams’, taking distance from the functionalists and instead come closer to the arguments of Clifford Geertz for what the he thought that a study of culture should be about. There are some theoretical outlines taking a dream as a text showing that the analysis of dream-elements is basically nothing more than a text analysis. That is a dream is a symbolic text that should be decoded. The keys of this coded language is given in the dream manuals and dream look-up tables in Islamic oneirocritic books (above all in Ibn-i Sirin’s book of dreams) where themselves are extracted from the religious books above all the Quran as the spoken words of God (Kalām ol-llah). Then a deep description of dreams in a Muslim, Sufi milieu calls for a deeper understanding of Quranic language and this itself raises some unavoidable philosophical discussions and preliminaries i.e. the strange relation between the ‘word’ and ‘flesh’ in an Islamic system of knowledge.

From the genuine world of ‘imperative’ (ālam-i ʾamr) to the illusive world of ‘creation’ (ālam-i khalgh)

Morgh bar bālāwa zir-i ān sāye-ash

Midavad bar khāk parān saye-vash

Ablahi ṣayād-i ān sāye shaved

Midavad chandānke bi māye shaved

Bikhabar kān ʿaks-i morgh-i havāst

Bikhabar ke aṣl-i ān sāye kojāst

The bird is above, and its shadow

is running bird-like below on the earth.

A fool becomes the hunter of that shadow

Running so much that he runs out of breath.

unaware that this is the reflection of the bird above

unaware of the origin of this shadow.

—Rumi

There is a general consensus on the stereotypical nature of dream narratives and it seems that every dream should be cast into the prescript forms of a narrative to be accepted by the society as an authentic true dream, but, what is astonishing is the fact that if someone faked up a dream story or a vision that its form matches with the form of meta-narratives of the dreams of a Muslim it would have the same phenomenological effects of a genuine dream^[12].

The classical and Quranic example of this magical power of suggestion that lies in the dream narrative (and not necessarily in the dream) is the faked dream of one of the two co-prisoners of Joseph the prophet who narrate their dreams for him in the prison. Joseph interpreted this cooked-up dream as a foretelling of the dreamer’s execution. An accident that has been fulfilled although it was not ever seen by that person and even when he become repentant of narrating that false dream Joseph answered that there is no way back and “the matter was already been decreed”(Heravi: 511-2):

O two companions of prison, as for one of you, he will give drink to his master of wine; but as for the other, he will be crucified, and the birds will eat from his head. The matter has been decreed about which you both inquire. (12:41)

Joseph has used the same words ghaḍā al-ʾamr (to decree an imperative) used by the God in the following verse:

Originator of the heavens and the earth. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, “Be,” and it is. (2:117)

This important verse relates the ‘flesh^[13]’ as what is seen in the real world or world of creation ālam-i khalgh (also known in Islamic philosophy as ālam-i koun o fisād which means the ever-changing world of creations) to what had been decreed in the world of ‘words’ or the world of’ imperative’ or ʿālam-i ʾamr (also known as ālam-i kon or roughly ālam-i ʾasmāʾ)^[14] . Rumi writes:

اسم هر چیزی بر ما ظاهرش

اسم هر چیزی بر خالق سرش

نزد موسی نام چوبش بد عصا

نزد خالق بود نامش اژدها

Our names of things convey the way they are seen

Their inner natures are what God’s names mean

For Moses simply called his stick ‘ a rod’^[15]

While ‘snake’ was what had been assigned by God. (Rumi (Mathnavi, Book one, Story of Lion and Rabbit (translated by Mojaddadi: 79))

Then in this philosophical system, every ‘thing’ in under-heaven is a logical analogy of a name (ʾism), word or logos (λόγος) once called or said in the form of an imperative in ālami kon and inversely every ‘thing’ is a allegory (tamṯīl) of its name from which it was once called or named^[16]. This Islamic-philosophy has tied itself firmly with the eidos of Plato after the translation movement of the Muslims in the Middle Ages (see Jamalpour: 343 ff.) with a large influence on Islamic Sufism and lranian Literature as like Rumi’s poem brought above as an epigraph.

Then the unchangeable world of words in Islam finds its analogy with the Plato’s theory of ideas known in Islamic philosophy as alam-i miṯāl. Moreover, it is utterly ‘logical’ that in Arabic Islamic literature there is just one word for both allegory and analogy: tamṯīl.

It is according to this philosophical groundwork that in the Islamic culture of dreams one may recognize a direct relation between what one sees as a vision (notwithstanding made-up or actual) and what should happen. Schimmel has also noticed that these made-up visions may reveal the suppressed wishes and hopes of their creators (cf. Schimmel: 325). An aspect that has no essential difference with western psychoanalytical theories of dream. Allegorically one can conclude that a dream is both a mirror of the decreed facts in the future and also a mirror of soul. This latter aspect of dreams which serves as the soul’s mirror has a therapeutic and diagnostic usefulness similar to the treats used in psychoanalysis but it is not a matter of direct emphasize and discussion in an Islamic culture in which individuality^[17] is not celebrated.

Iain R. Edgar has also described this:

…while in Freudian theory the latent meaning of the dream is usually perceived as a repressed sexual desire and deciphering this latent meaning is part of the purpose of psychoanalysis, such encoded sexual dreams in Islamic dream theory are not considered important, as desire is seen as appropriately regulated through the Shariʿa law, based on the teaching of the Quran and the hadithes. (Edgar: 113)

In a Muslim society and specially among the Sufis, the individualistic needs and traits are read as different attributes of nafs or ego, an elusive and illusive entity that should be controlled if not eliminated. Ego for a mystic has not an existential essence and hence, it is of no importance (though it has immense virtual effects on psychological state and social status) and because of its illusive nature, it is considered as an obstacle or veil (ḥijāb) in the way of God (ḥaq= truth). The removal of this veil is the only and life-long duty of every Sufi. The full elimination of nafs is the ultimate – and almost unreachable^[18]– goal of a Sufi. It is usually named as Jihād-i Akbar or the biggest Jihad to allude to its hardness. In the allegorical language of Sufis, the soul itself is considered as a mirror (expressed in many poetical combinations and forms such as āʾīne-yi rouḥ, āʾīne-yi jān, āʾīne-yi ghalb, āʾīne-yi dil, āʾīne-yi jām, jām-I jahān bin etc. ) will and nafs is what that makes this mirror contaminated and dusty so the images in this mirror (God’s will (ghaḍāyi ʾilāhī)) look distorted and vague. All that one sees in the mirror of the soul (i.e. in a dream) is a direct reflection of the God’s will or message. The clarity of this message is dependent to the degree of which the soul has retained itself clean -through devoutness, piety, recoursing to a sheikh, doing some techniques and disciplines as like commemoration, ritual dances and so on… Rumi writes:

Love wants its tale^[19] (sokhan)revealed to everyone

But your heart’s mirror won’t reflect this sun

Don’t you know why we can’t perceive it here?

Your mirror’s face is rusty, scrap it clear! (Rumi, masnavi, translated by Mojaddadi: 6)

In short, when a Sufi is advanced in his/her way (ṭarighat) he/she will see clearly the truth and his/her soul reflects nothing than the will of God. Otherwise the uncanny images in this mirror (i.e. the objects seen in a dream) are rather the reflections of the obstacles that the Sufi has in his/her way. His /her unfulfilled missions for elimination of nafs as the source of desires (hawāhāyi nafsāni). In such a case, instead of clear images, the dreamer for instance sees his/her own ego or better to say a composite structure with different degrees of truth and falsity, just like the images that one sees in a dusty mirror. For a new apprentice (murid), the Sufis’ culture of dreams has a lot to share with a Freudian theory of dreams. By hearing to the dreams of his pupils, a Sheikh understands of the obstacles through which they should battle their way for reaching God/truth (ḥaq) and gives each of them the necessary instructions of how to evade the involved desires of nafs.

As stated before, inside this culture of dream, for a clear mirror of soul, a dream entails a prophesying capacity that could clearly reflect the will of God. This (in contrast to the last case in which a dream was considered as a set of imaginative reflections seen from the dusty mirror of the dreamer’s soul) may lead us to a crucial difference and diffraction from a ‘western psychological theory of the night dream’ and an Islamic theory. The difference lies in the big shift of focus from the ‘dreamer’ into the ‘dream’. The language of the dreamer (as a negligible servant of God (bandeyi khodā)) functions like an empty container for the full language of God spoken in a dream. What is said in this full language is ‘decreed’ and would be happen. The real world follows the true word of the dream like a shadow. What is important here is this fact that this absolute fullness and emptiness (and similarly the decreed and deliberate (jabr o ekhtiyār)) are coined with each other as two facets of the same fact whose understanding is subjected to a “thick description”.

Schimmel has also related the foreboding aspect of dreams with alam-i miṯāl or the (Platonian)world of ideas and the fate of the human that is prescribed in Loh-i maḥfouẓ (ibid). Loh-i maḥfouẓ or the “protected board” (Wohlverwahrte Tafel) (Quran 85:22) is a board on which God has “written” all that is happened and should be happened with the holy feather (ghalam) (Quran 68:1). Many Muslims even think of a special sort of matter for it embodied in a white pearl (dorratol-beyḍāʾ) that has covered everywhere from west to east and from earth up to the heaven (cf. Wolf: 3) some others think of it of this very world in which all of our deeds remain perpetually in the form of its effects (to read more about Loh-i maḥfouẓ and its relating highly controversial discussions see: Kalantari: 117ff.).

In the 5th chapter of my dissertation, the relation between ‘the word’ (kalame) and ʿālam-i miṯāl in an Islamic context is discussed and it is tried to show that in this context, a ‘word’ not only works as a model or idea for the materialistic matters or ‘flesh’, but also they have a kind of indexical relation with each other like the relation between a body (accordingly word) and its shadow (flesh). Schimmel has outlined a parallel relation between the world of dream (ʿālam-i Royā) and ʿālam-i miṯāl :

…was hier im Traum geschah, war nichts anderes als was schon in der höheren Welt bestimmt war, auf welche Weise auch immer man diese höhere Welt definiere – ob es die Wohlverwahrte Tafel war, auf der seit Anbeginn der Welt alles, was je geschehen sollte, in dem menschlichen Verstand unzugänglichen Lettern geschrieben ist, oder ob es die Zwischenwelt, ʿālam-i miṯāl war, wo die Urbilder aller Dinge lokalisiert sind. (Schimmel: 325)(should be translated in English)

The signification system between the ‘word’ seen in the world of dreams or ʿālam-i Royā and its ‘flesh’ or shadow as its decreed effect in the world of reality is direct and straightforward. For example seeing teeth in a dream meant the members of the family and it is more or less clear which tooth stands for which member and hence seeing that a tooth is fallen foretells the death of that member etc.

Although a dream is a mirror of future as a decreed command of God, but in a similar manner in which a person can bypass the decreed order of an despot^[20] ruler and change his/her bad fortune into a good one, there is also some degree of freedom for an opposite metonymical interpretation of what is seen in a dream. This free space for metonymical interpretation lets the dream expert to interpret (taʿbīr) the dream for this opposite meaning which is the art of a good skilled interpreter to enjoy all the facilities given in the elaborate set of interpretive devices in the large Islamic culture of dream for bringing a happy dream into life. Then, interpretation or taʿbīr is essentially an effort for giving birth a bad-fated dream into the real world in the form of a good-featured happy tiding. It is an art for bypassing or avoiding the bad-fated meaning ‘written’ in the decreed ‘word’ of god as the ruler (ḥākim) on our life. In this art the instant direct meaning of the dream may be bypassed by using the potential of the words for being read differently and this is perhaps one of the reasons or interpretations that the word used for interpretation in this culture is taʿbir which means ‘to pass’ as like somebody passes a bridge. Taʿbir or the declaration of ‘word’, marks the transition from destiny to ‘chance’ through the capacity of the word for metonymy. Here a moʿaber or interpreter helps or better to say ‘cares’ a dream to be correctly materialized in our world, that is, to come correctly and healthy from its origin that is the world of imperative ālam-i ʾamr into our side that is in the world of creation ālam-i khalgh in the form of happy happening or even to abort it by giving some advices to the dreamer like giving an alms (ṣadaghe) and charity. But still the main instrument in the hand of a dream expert is ḥosn-I taʿbir that is to take the dream content as a good tiding and this mostly happens by means of his expertise on the symbols and their alternative meanings in Quran and books of hadiths. The meaning of these words are mostly primal and based on its special science of hermeneutics thereof the meaning of a word is changeable. The interpreter modifies the meaning of a word -and accordingly a decreed event in future- by revolting and deferring its original referential point as in the case of Maʾmoun’s dream^{[21] [22]} . All these are also not far from the concept of protected board (louḥ-i maḥfouz) and its embedded paradoxical options for changeability known in Islamic philosophy as louḥ-i maḥv wa Iṯbāt or the board of elimination and confirmation which again is based on some verses of Quran: “Allah eliminates what He wills or confirms, and with Him is the Mother of the Book.” (13:39) (see for the relation between these boards: Jafari, 2001)

The language of dreams in a Persianate society

Alle Orakel reden die Sprache in der du fragst.

—Ernst Bertram

The dependence of dreams to something imperatively fore-written in ālam-i ʾamr also justifies their stereotypical nature and unchanging structure in Islamic tradition of dreams because they are just some shadowy manifestation of the unchangeable Godly tradition (sonat-i ʾIlāhi). But dreams in a Persianate context have particularly one more feature than Islamic dreams as a whole that helps them to follow the same grammar of the fore-written dreams in their folklore and accordingly fore-written literature.

A special feature of Persianate societies that the anthropologist Jean Lecref has again related it to a less explicative term of ‘Islamic civilization’ as a whole:

Consultation of sources in folklore seems to do little beyond confirming, in more or less original forms, the important role dreams played in general popular representation and in Islamic civilization in particular (Lecref: 365).

This extra feature is but due to the general forbiddance that exists as a normative against the popular representation of individuality in Persianate societies (and not necessarily in the Islamic civilizations). This camouflage of ego is related to the economic and technical determinism of ghanāt and the culture aroused from the watering system reviewed in the first chapter of my dissertation. This determinism has constructed the society in the form of a highly bipolar but unilateral relation between the king and his subjects in a long course of the history.

We might look at these ‘ folkloric original forms’ in pre-Islamic narratives and to tie this culture of dreams which Lecref has considered them as ‘ Islamic’ to its original non-Islamic and pre-Islamic origin.

In the dissertation ‘The Book of Ascension ‘ (miʿrāj nāme) will be reviewed as an example of these ‘original forms’ and its relation with the ‘popular dreams’ would be examined. In this review it would be revealed that in all different Islamic and pre-Islamic forms of miʿrāj nāme we are dealing with texts that were copying one another. After a full review of the pre-Islamic religious books, their influence on what is called today as the Islamic dream culture would become clear. ‘The book of Ascension’ is a written text on the most important night journey in Islam. Then, the study of this book would serve as example to show that in every early written work on the Muslim tradition of interpretation there are aspects that are also copied from each other. This conclusion is supported by “the nature of the parallels between the different texts, which are in most cases so specific that it is impossible to imagine them not to result from textual interdependence.” (Lambreaux: 104). All the dreams that are gathered here from the Kurdish popular culture in the form of interviews in the appendixes are just a kind of affirmative reply to those narrative forms that one may discover in Kurdish hagiographies and religious books that this book has confined its scope on just one of them that is ‘The Book of Ascension’. The writers of these books were first and foremost conservators of an inherited pre-Islamic tradition which were survived both in Zoroastrian religious books and believes rooted in the region and oral culture. These writers liked to fill the Islamic books with things that they already knew.

All these regional details do not contradict the claim of I. R. Edgar who writes: “Islam is the largest night dream culture in the world today” (Edgar: 1).Then, what is special with this work other than its historical hagiographical survey in pursuance of the non-Islamic origins of this culture? Where is its anthropological accent?

Before answering these questions it would be helpful to make a short review on the way that many Orient scholars have tried to classify the huge amount of dream material in Muslim societies and narratives to increase its manageability. A full review of their works would take a dozen of pages then, it suffices to remind one of the most fundamental classifications done by Gustave Edmund von Grunebaum, the Austrian historian and Arabist. Other forms of classification are more or less the same^[23]. Grunebaum classifies the dreams in classical Islam in the following five distinct categories:

The dreamers receives personal messages.

The dream constitutes a private prophecy.

Dreams elucidate theological doctrine.

The dream bears on politics.

The dream is used as a tool of political prophecy. (Grunebaum: 11-21)

This kind of classification reveals for example that there might be utilitarian purpose behind a dream but it is not possible to decide if there is a utilitarian purpose behind a dream from its manifest content, this categorical approach also says nothing about the structural form of dream narratives. For example in the famous dream of Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi in which his illness was cured through a dream in which he drank a bowl of water from the hands of Ali, the first Imam of Shiites (See Pahlavi:50-51), it is impossible to decide just on the basis of its content, to which category above it belongs. It pretty fits in all five categories^[24].

Moreover and most importantly , this kind of classification do not tell so much about the social class of the dreamer. It is categorized by the function of the dream. Although this function is not apart from the intention of the dreamer but this kind of categorization is unable to tell about the real intention of the dreamer as a social agent. Although to know and explain about the real intentions behind what the agents say or do is the main duty of an anthropologist but in a Persianate context and in concern with the dream narratives, the true intention is not recognizable neither from the manifest form of the dream nor through a psychoanalysis of the latent content of the dreams because they all, more and less, obey the same grammar and ‘rule of tongue’, to say, they are ‘empty’. This is perhaps the reason that the scholars who have worked on the dream culture in the Islamic world, do not sort them through their structural forms of narrative. These narratives are more or less the same, especially the religious dreams narrated by a normal ‘subject’ are mostly casted in the same synopsis of which an ‘old wise man’ appears and ‘gives’ the one who has dreamt him, something like a bowl of water or else that symbolizes the fulfillment of his/her wish. We have terminologically named this ‘old wise man’ as bābā and this given ‘thing ‘ as ‘Water’ or ‘āb’. Then ‘Bābā āb dād’ or ‘Papa Gives Water’ appears to be the most popular formula of religious dreams. This formula is a theoretical tool to show that regardless of the superficial differences that dreams have, they are structurally the same. It is through this undifferentiated and hence recognizable structure of popular dreams that they are able to become circulated and found publicity (or at least try their chance for finding publicity). For those who are in the substratum of the society’s pyramid, the only way to find an ear for hearing their collective repressed wishes is to see or make ready-made dreams with common empty narrativty. The more a dream deviates from the pre-known structures, the more they reveal the individuality of their dreamers and hence they would not be able to circulate. This is analogous to ‘private money’ that is failed to circulate because money, per definition, should be collective in the sense of its recognizablity for every one of its value. This homogeneity of popular religious dreams have pushed them aside from an anthropological structural analysis. But this should not gloss over the importance and necessity of such an analysis and quite on its contrary it is exactly what an anthropologist should risk to do. Such an analysis is on the level of “thick description^[25]”.

It is like the interpretative effort of a “twitch”. A twitch of the eyebrow for itself is a twitch but to know if it was a communicative intent behind a twitch or a mere physiological reaction we need to make a “thick description” (cf. Armittage: 98). The twitch by itself is then ‘empty’. In the same manner the interpretation of the intention behind the narration of a dream, in its popular form and in a Kurdish context, is similar to the interpretation of the “empty language” of a twitch (reconsidering all the notions already discussed in the first part according to the Lacanian term of “empty language”) because the intention of the dream’s narrator is totally different from its interpretation and it is usually impossible to reach from one to the other. Its interpretation is already there, reserved in their manual of dreams i.e. in the dream book of Ibn-i Sirin but this option that its narrator has fundamentally faked it is also possible because some social gains and benefits are thinkable for narrating a fake dream. For example seeing the prophet in a dream signals the virtue of its dreamer and hence brings his status up in the eyes of the other as it is believed through a reliable hadith from the Prophet who said “whoever sees me in a dream will see me in his wakefulness.” ^[26]

But this hadith has nothing to do with the made up dreams. It is also impossible to decide from the narrational structure of these dreams for their authenticity as all of them are alike, following the stereotype of a formal empty description. For example in most of them the prophet is seen in the form of light and after that the dreamers woke up of the excitement of knowing that this light is Mohammad.

By considering this empty language, one discovers that some stereotypical synopsis and structures of narrativity is that thread that sews and links vertically all the five different categories listed above recognized by Grunebaum and this is why that it is nearly impossible to guess from the content of a dream alone to which category it belongs.

The anthropological effort of this work lies in the structural analysis of this multifaceted valorized culture of dreams. This effort is a reductive one in which all of the dream narratives will be sublimate into its most elementary components to achieve some simple formulas such as ‘Bābā āb dād’. Without using this kind of structural and meanwhile reductive formulation to reach the main grammars working behind the dreams, the logic of the dreams would be lost in the ambiguity of abundant rich forms that dream stories could ever take through their different facial elements. For example in the mentioned formula of ‘Bābā āb dād’ the term āb is used as a register that potentially could be filled with potentially infinite elements as like as money, jewel, news, present, consult, helping…or water. It is premised here that this reductive approach would finally lead to the ontological origin of these dreams which in turn, makes the description of their ontic behavior easier.

To differentiate between the structural forms of the dreams was that traumatic abyss that this work is endeavored to work on it, at least at its beginning, it had the pretension to differentiate and sort the dreams according to their structure, truth value, functionality and so on..

Here we should consider not only the terms but also the relationship between the terms of a dream story-line. Then this approach falls pretty well in the field of ‘Structural Anthropology’. The other reason that makes this approach structuralistic is that for a structural analysis of a culture it is needed to allocate its elements in a some kind of ‘signification table’, that is to sort out the “structures of signification” in that culture to make it meaningful or decodable. Then working on the dreams is a readymade ethnographical work in this sense that every culture (of dream) as a symbolic construction, develops its own dream-books which are in fact and before everything else, some look up tables of significations which are usually constructed like a dictionary of literary symbols: ‘this’ stands for ‘that’ and ‘that’ stands for..and so on. This is somehow like what Lacan refers to as the chain of signifiers by proposing a dictionary as an example with this difference that the chain of signifiers in a dream-book has no ‘slippage’ as it has in a dictionary (each word stands for many meanings and every meaning of a word (as signifier) covers just some parts of its ultimate ‘signified’ and so on..) (cf. Seminar III, p.32). Instead, the relation between a symbol in an ‘Islamic dream’ and its meaning is rather indexical, fixed and localized. Although nothing is absolute and there is a big similarity between Islamic and Western theories of dream, and what is referred here -as the potential of the words and signs for metonymical interpretation in Iranian culture and languages- is perhaps something universal, but this feature is over-weighted in this cultural context. The capacity for metonymical interpretation rests on the inner feature of every language. What is represented here as a hint, is the higher capacity and capability of Persianate languages for metonymical occurrences as a long function of totalitarian autonomous states.

Every reader of this book has perhaps read about the ‘Oriental despotism’ or similar out-dated concepts of 19^th imperialism, but it may interesting to take a look on the effect of this despotism on language as their objective collective form of unconsciousness^[27] especially in those domains that it works metonymic. In fact without metonymy (as a capability for seeing ‘this’ as ‘that’) there would be no ambiguity and unconscious.

We already know by the study of “Religious Totalism and Civil Liberties” in western societies (Lifton, 1987) that the first characteristic process of ideological despotism is “milieu control” which is essentially the control of communication and if the control is extremely intense, it becomes an internalized control: an attempt to manage an individual’s inner communication. A dream is the best example for an inner communication.

Now by considering an Oriental community in which a despotic king as the symbolic father impediments and conditions the reach of his people to their desires -and also by considering the synergic effect of the blend of religion into politics in this person that bestows him a godly aura in an indexical relation with the almighty god (i.e. in an Islamic-Iranian context the king is considered as the shadow of Allah: zil-ollah)- the people recognize him as their common objection and obstacle for their desires^[28].

This collective and meanwhile psychological stance of the people against their king as the one who shadows on their lives and -both physically and mentally- represses their desires is describable with ‘Ressentiment’ in the words of Max Scheler which for him, is itself a repressed form of revenge:

Revenge tends to be transformed into Ressentiment the more it is directed against lasting situations which are felt to be ‘injurious’ but beyond one’s control – in other words, the more the injury is experienced as a destiny… Through its very origin, Ressentiment is therefore chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. (Scheler: 45 via Kospit: 120)

This common and grim sense of Ressintiment, gives to the so-called ‘inner communication’ of the subjects – with whatever ironic meanings that it may have- a strong collective dimension so that they share their common desires -and meanwhile their inner-control for avoiding these desires- in the words and the language that they use in the daytime. Dream as field of inner communication becomes a lot of known forms of cliché’s or emptiness because the ‘subjects’ are undifferentiated and even in respect to that common thing that they dream about.

The difference between a king’s dream as an integrated free person and the dreams of unintegrated persons who dream in the automated way of routine doing of every other things is the difference between a True and False Selves (cf. Winnicott: 148). Notwithstanding of the true intention of the False Self^[29], this False Self “is represented by the whole organization of the polite and mannered social attitude” (ibid: 142-143) can become all too compliant to environmental demands and all too imitative of others and all too ready to be exploited by them (ibid: 146-147). The dream narrative of the subjects (in spite of the king’s) eschews spontaneity, presenting an average compliant False Self, reifying it into a ready-made dummy as empty as everyday’s social manners and routines.

This emptiness has a common and wide range for occurrence and appliance in language as the common medium for communication from a word till a full narrative. Then, this fact that makes the realization of the real intention of a dream narrator for narrating a dream impossible, has the common phenomenal ground with the emptiness of speeches used in social manners (tʿārofāt) and the formalities used in the official administrative bureaucratic correspondencies and accordingly in the ambiguity of bipolar meanings in the primal words^{[30] [31]}.

Before going further and describing the social aspects of ‘primal words’ it is necessary to describe why this much emphasize on a linguistic subject such as ‘primal words’ is ever necessary in a book that is supposed to be mainly focused on the dream culture among the Sufis.

Firstly and particularly, the abundance of primal words In the Sufis’ literature is one of the main features of Sufis’ language and Iranian languages in general because it has developed mainly under the shadow of Sufis’ culture or better to say counter-culture. On the other hand, the language has the primal primacy for the intelligibility from a dream. Notwithstanding this famous quote of Lacan which says “unconsciousness is structured like a language” there is even a more basic tread that ties the dream to the language and it is the language in which a dream is narrated: “The symbolic language of a dream should be translated into that of waking thought. Thus symbolism is a second and independent factor in the distortion of dreams, alongside of the dream-censorship” (Freud, 1916: 168)

Then the dream symbolism is a allocation table of signs and signifiers that works in subordination to language as a the major system of signification and also the main source of distortion.

Secondly, the study of primal words –condensation of two contraries in one word- is a general study of dreams when we recall of ‘condensation’ as one of the main treats of the dream-work for taming two insurmountable opposites (i.e. id and superego) in one composite. Freud likewise argues that “among the most surprising findings is the way in which the dream-work treats contraries that occur in the latent dream…Conformities in the latent material are replaced by condensations in the manifest dream. Well, contraries are treated in the same way as conformities, and there is a special preference for expressing them by the same manifest element.” (Freud, 1916: 178). A primal word is a collective dream-work. (See also the after-thoughts of this section.)

This correlative relation between the primal words and dream-work is more conspicuous among the Sufis because all the Sufis symbolism, argot language and literature is essentially based on their invention -as well as innovative use- of a set of primal words. Every word or symbol used in Sufism has an opposite value in the normal and practical life of a Muslim if he/she ever minds to remain religious (moteshareʿ)while a Sufi utilizes this linguistic privilege to talk deliberately about wine, woman, sexuality etc.. A deep understanding of this feature of Sufis’ language is the key-point for understanding the Iranian languages, poetry and dreams because the Iranian literature is scarcely considerable without the immense influence of Sufis through their inventions of ‘primal words’.

Primal words and the pyramid of the society

Dishab ṣedāyi tishe nayāmad ze Bistoun

Gouyā be khābi Shirīn Farhād rafte bāshad

The clack of chip-axe was not heard from (the mountain of ) Bistoun last night

Perhaps Farhād has went to a deep sweet sleep^[32].

Freud has used a line from Aeneid as an epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams (1900): “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronto movebo”: “ If I cannot bend the higher powers, I shall stir up Hell.“ This epigraph is used by Freud to allude to the relation between a dream and wish-fulfillment. This wish -at least in the extent of this epigraph- is a political wish that is a wish for coming up in the social pyramid as a superior. It is helpful to keep in mind that even the inferno and heaven, in the divine comedy of Dante, are in the form of pyramids. Freud’s unconscious, which he equates with the Acheron, shares certain crucial features with underworld but underworld could meanwhile be interpreted politically to share features with the people from a lower social strata and emarginated people. This is the social aspect of underworld and the transparent (and meanwile subliminal camouflaged) objective aspect of unconsciousness in contribution with a more general and universal theory of dream.

Boticelli’s depiction of Dante’s Inferno

Most of the things that we learn from the ‘return to Freud^[33]’ project of Lacan is to understand that the ‘symbolic order’ is that social world of linguistic communication through which the society dictates its rules in us that is in our unconsciousness or to put it in his own famous formulation: “the unconsciousness is structured like a language”. Unconsciousness speaks (ce parle) in us and mirrors the same structure of symbolic order- or Levi Strauss’s ‘order of culture’- by mediation of language. It articulates our desires in the interstices of what is permitted by the big Other. In other words, the structure off society (its pyramid) and unconsciousness are in conformity with each other.

Although Freud was not familiar with the new structuralists approach into language but in ‘return to Freud’ we understand that Freud’s ideas of “slips of the tongue,” jokes, and the interpretation of dreams, all emphasize the agency of language in the constitution of ‘subject’ and the topology of mind. Especially and in his use of the Aeneid’s expression as the epigraph of his work, he reveals his attention toward the structural body of unconsciousness and moreover the mirror-like conformity between the pyramid of the society and this structure as the subjective reflection of this pyramid on mind. This reflection is nothing more than the ‘symbolic order’ which mediates the relation between the subject and the big Other by means of language. In other words, the failure for access to conscious mental life has found its expression -according to a Freudian western theory of dreams- in unconsciousness that is in the compromise formation of dreams, slip of tongues , jokes and symptoms. In the collective reflection of this theory, the stress is again on those recognizable moments that the unconscious breaks through the conscious thought but not of a individual subject but in the conscious thought of all subjects and people, that is in the ‘ words’. In other words -and in the domain of appliance of these theories for a hydraulic state- this expressive function of language remains no more subjective, just in the same way that the pyramid of the society is no more an abstract schema and is overtly visible in the water pipes of watering system. In the first chapter 1-1: BĀBĀ (pp.93-130) of my dissertation and in our review of the watering system of Sanandaj, it was generally discussed that how in a Karizian civilization or hydraulic states in these Persianate societies the aqueducts sketch the fixed reified lines of the societies pyramid. In this real body of pyramid, the water flows from the pools of the water-lords through a network of conduits into the houses of people of a lower status and so forth… Then these water conduits are some physical traces who schematize the social pyramid in ‘flesh’ so that the social class of everyone is observable by a simple look into the way that he is watered in this watering system. Channels of Qhanāt are both a ‘model for’ and a ’model of’ the society. The social class pyramid is hence not an abstract schema anymore but something real, concrete and visible in the pipes of water in which the domains of ‘real’ and ‘symbolic’ are perfectly coincided with each other.

As the symbolic order and along to it, the structure of unconscious and language are all due to the reciprocal reflection of the social pyramid in the ‘subject’, the overt realization of this symbolic order in the real body of water pipes, calls for a similar objective realization of unconsciousness in the language. This objective realization of suppressed desires of the subject is reflected in every aspect of Iranian languages including Kurdish: in the built-in facilities of these languages for talking ironic or even to say lies^[34], in the empty language of everyday routines, hidden intention of the narrator of a narrative, dream story-lines and most exemplary in the ‘primal words’.

As all of these different genres are of the same nature, explaining the ‘primal words’ may reveal many facts about the dream culture. The reason for this focus is self-evident because it is more simple to analyze a simple word than a full narrative.

To see the importance of this analysis, it is useful to realize that a dream story as a whole could behave like a primal word, that is it could be understood as its far opposite. As Iain R. Edgar has also noted in his book: ” In certain dreams, inversion takes place and a dream symbol must be assigned a meaning opposite of its apparent meaning” (Edgar: 110. On the next few pages he has denoted -as a difference between a “Western Psychological Theories of the Night Dream” and an Islamic theory- that: “ In Islamic theory the manifest dream content can be the same as the latent one” (Edgar: 113). This ‘primal’ feature of narratives in the Persianate societies and their capability for ‘double signification’ finds its root in the hermeneutic nature of Oriental way of discourse mostly innovated by Sufis especially by innovating a new brand of ‘primal words’ in which for example a word like mey or āb stands for heavenly knowledge and intoxication but simultaneously signals for its opposite that is the worldly wine and drinks or the word sāghi (the one who serves wine)who stands for an ‘old wise man’ but is depicted in the Sufis’ literature as a young beautiful woman^[35]. This trait is not restricted to the ‘primal words’ and in fact the same logic- that rules over the ‘primal words’ in Arabic, Kurdish, Persian and especially in Sufis literature- also rules on the dream books . As our focus is on the Kurdish people and the book of Ibn-i Sirin is the most favored and popular dream book in the Kurdish culture, here are some examples of this logic in which two opposite things share the same interpretation:

To see heaven (jannah) mostly predestinates its dreamer as one who enters the heaven after death but seeing the hell (jahīm) could be interpreted either as hell or heaven that is as its far opposite (cf. Ibn-i Sirin: 125-126). Water and fire as an insurmountable pair have also the same interpretation, seeing water and fire both stands for a king (Ibn-i Sirin: 375). Seeing a desert without water and also a land without food (ghaḥṭī) both stands for a fertile time and richness (Ibn-i Sirin: 386-387). The examples of this kind are many. The complexity of understanding the logic working behind the dream books and dream manuals in an Islamic culture lies in what Freud has once named ‘assonance’ and ‘similarity of the words’ (Freud, 1900: 72). The meaning of a symbol seen in a dream is more complex to be deducted from its superficial meaning and a dream is a fantastic ‘nominal’ riddle which is supposed to have actual consequences in appropriation to the way that is interpreted. This fact that a dream is a riddle is seemed to be universal Every dream is a riddle that should be solved. This makes at least one element in the Oedipus complex universal: the sphinx, as the one who asks riddles. In contrast to sphinx, Oedipus is the prototype of a dream interpreter who is tragically confronted the consequences of his knowledge. One main difference that one can delineate as an early conclusion is that the answer of this riddle in Occidental modern psychology as the established form of dream interpretation is an striving wiliness for confronting a terrifying truth about the dreamer (a terrifying event in the past or childhood, a primordial crime of patricide and so on..) and not a striving willness for confronting the events in future. Hence a dream in modern psychology is rather a mirror that tells us about the dreamer’s psychological situation, where in Oriental the science of dreams (ʿIlm ol-royā), a dream is a riddle that should be solved through the primordial pact with the ‘name of Father’, through this pact, the interpreter of a the dream is also a fore-seer and dream functions as a mirror for seeing the future.

This pact is the language or the science of names or ʿilm ol-asmāʾ, a science that is the point of privilege of human being (ādam) in compare to the other creatures of the god in an Islamic system of philosophy. A good interpreter is the one who masters this science and through this science helps the dreamer to avoid the consequences of a primordial crime or sin through a different read of the dream that potentially entails opposite interpretations and meanings^[36]. Hence a dream in the Oriental science of dreams (ʿIlm ol-royā) is a changeable fate and a mirror through which one can see both the spiritual stand and the destiny of the dreamer. Regardless of how complex and professional this science of dreams (ʿIlm ol-royā) could be, which is out of the scope of this book and knowledge of this writer, one thing is sure and that is the crucial role that language as a rule plays in the interpretation of what has been seen in a dream. This language for a Muslim who is familiar with the Quran (as the words of Allah or kalām ollah) is Arabic but this does not dismiss the influence and associations that the native language may put on the dream’s modality of interpretation. The close relation with verbality (kalām) and the ‘written’ (maktoub) is reflected in its best in the name attributes of Quran which is not kitāb ollah (that is the book of allah) but Kalām ol-llah or the words or sayings of Allah.

Besides, the word ‘word’ (kalame) in Arabic has preserved its oral, verbal nature: Kalām comes from takalom or speaking and accordingly Qurān should be understood as the sayings of Allah. This is also the general name that for example Ahli–ḥaqq in Kurdistan have given to their religious books: Kalām-I Ahl-i ḥaqq (In a similar way Qewl among the Yazidis??) . Studying the connectivity between maktoub, -which literally means both mandatory and written- as the law of God and the verbal and even vernacular origin of the languages in which the religious book are written is not a side track of studying the dreams. ‘Speech’ (kalām) and ‘word’ (kalame) in an Islamic context are ontologically and etymologically related to each other. One (the oral literature) is the origin of the other (written) and nonetheless today they are blended to each other:

The transition from a predominantly oral to (partially) written tradition led some Yezidis and Ahl-I Haq to think of their sacred literature in terms of concepts which derive from literate cultures, and may be misleading when applied to a tradition such as theirs. On the other hand, it cannot be assumed that the mainly oral character of the tradition implies that writing plays no role there at all. Yezidis in the West, it seems, increasingly tend to think of the Qewls as parts of a Canon, a well-defined authoritative codex of sacred texts similar in status to the scriptures of other religions. As the nature and functions of the original tradition were in reality quite different, this can lead to misunderstandings….The underlying assumption seems to be that such texts, whether they are known from oral tradition or from late manuscripts, are all parts or versions of a single, original sacred book.( Yarshater: 86-87)

A society in which the dissimilarities and even discrepancies between different oral narratives are described as different versions of a single original book could be thought as an oral society. Such a feature is more conspicuous in an oral culture like Kurdish (cf. Yarshater: 87 ff.) and especially among the Sufis who put their highest stress on their mother tongue of their regional language that comes from the heart instead from the rational conventions usually used in a religious orthodox discourse and this is why that Rumi and the most other masters of Sufism in the Persianate societies wrote their verses in Farsi or their own regional tongue although most of them had a good command on Arabic. There is a rare use of Arabic in the verses of Sufis and in fact in the moments that they want to tie their discourse to Quran that is to a godly discourse. Freud writes in his explanations on the role of ‘verbal expression’ in the ‘Oriental dream manuals ’ that:

The dream, indeed, is so intimately connected with verbal expression …that every tongue has its own dream-language. A dream is, as a rule, not to be translated into other languages. (Freud, 1900: 72)

The context in which he comes to this (the Orient) is also interesting and plausible and supports the stress put here on the importance of understanding the fore-consciouss function of ‘primal words’ in Kurdish (and accordingly Persian and Arabic) as a prerequisite for understanding the nature of Kurdish, (Persian and Arabic) dreams. Just a few sentences before this quote, he claims on the extraordinary significance of puns and the play upon words in the old archaic Oriental cultures:

…Oriental dream-books, of which ours are pitiful plagiarisms, commonly undertake the interpretation of dream- elements in accordance with the assonance and similarity of words. Since these relationships must be lost by translation into our language, the incomprehensibility of the equivalents in our popular “dream-books” is hereby explained. (Freud, 1900: 72)

Then a dream narrative is more like a poem, that is an ‘event’ that happens in the language and not through the language. In the same manner, the ‘truth value’ of a dream is a function of the ‘truth value’ of the everyday speech of its dreamer. The linguistic and verbal facets of the dreams are not something unknown in the Islamic culture of dreams. Ibn-i Sirin heard it from Abu Hurayrah that the prophet said: “…He whose dreams are most true is he whose speech is most true.” (Lamoreaux: 132)

The direct, reflexive and perfunctory relation between a dream and the way that its dreamer handles with the language in the act of giving sound and expression to his/her dream (as well as his/her ideas, experiences and so on…) is a factor that a good interpreter or a skilled Sufi keeps in mind for interpretation.

In my own experience, when I asked a sheikh: “why some people forget their dreams?” He answered because they lie too much. I asked again “I do not lie too much but it is very scarcely to me to remember of my dreams” and he replied:” You talk too much! You are always trying to find a proper word to express your ideas. In the run of this process opens a chance for the false words to slip on your tongue. Talking with falsified words is essentially not different from lying. Then you commit lying unawares”.

Dreams of subjects and the subjective dream of the King: Two different class of dreams recognizable in a Persianate society

Shah cho ʾIskandar javān ast o Khāje hamchon Khizr pir

Ey ʾIskandar lazemast in Khizr rahbar dāshtan

The king is young like Alexander and Vizier is Old like the Khidr

Oh Alexander, you have to take this Khidr as your mentor

—Ghā-āni, elegy no. 284

Although the stereotypical nature of Islamic dreams is repeatedly mentioned we still may have to single out the dreams of kings and conquerors. The reason of this exception is somehow clear: A king for a sheepish society is a kind of Moses who lives in a beacon out of the perception of the banal others or the herd men (cf. Nietzsche: 423 via Kuspit: 114) . He is the one who has once overcome fate. His subjects collectively submit to him in order to realize in him vicariously their own confrontation with fate(cf. Popper: 458 f.).

There are many evidences and literature in which a king dreams of a very astonishing irregular form of dreams. Again, the most classical story on this is to be found in the story of Joseph in Quran when he is recalled out from the prison to interpret the bizarre dream of Pharaoh^[37] (Quran, 12: 43-46).

and the same weird but meaningful dreams are also to be found among the Kurdish people and perhaps the most notable among them is the dream of the forefather of Sallahidin Ayoubi, the Kurdish conqueror of the Jerusalem who saw a very long detailed dream which would be neglected as an disturbed dream if it were seen by an average ‘subject’. In his dream he saw himself urinating upward into the sky until it reaches a cloud and the cloud started to rain over Jerusalem until the city became totally washed and afterward appeared a moon and many stars behind that cloud and then grew all kind of plants and then appeared of about 100 cows and grazed the weeds then appeared a lot of pigs from the sea and they killed all the cows just one who escaped toward Damascus. Afterward came lions as big as camels from Egypt and they killed all the pigs but one of them escaped in the sea and so on…” (Ibn dawādari, VII, p. 15 cited in Schimmel:87-88 & Langner: 76). This dream has been fulfilled in the form of conquest of Jerusalem by one of his grandsons Sallahidin Ayoubi.

In general seeing a dream of urinating -as well as shitting- in holy places in a dream are narratives about the rise of a new dynasty which signal a successful succession of the throne by the sons or grandsons of a male dreamer; it will be seen in the next passages that how the same pattern of dreams and story-lines with the same interpretation had come true for the dreams of two caliphs.

The dream of Sheikh Safi al-Din the forefather of Safavid dynasty –who like many other prominent personalities is believed to have a Kurdish origin (See Ayoubiyan, 1964(a): 295 ff.)-can also not to be pigeonholed in the popular conventional form of narratives. There are six different versions of these dreams used essentially as a tool for political prophecy ( Quinn: 127-147) but in none of these dreams (and also the dreams that would be come on the next paragraphs) an “old wise man” archetype paces in the dream to give the dreamer water or something to eat or drink as it is supposed to the thesis of this work as the most usual form of a prophesying dream. Then the narrative structure of a dream and the way that it is handled or proposed for interpretation through the society is not separable from the social class of dreamer. There are a big amount of dreams seen by the subjects that have a chance to be narrated or recognized as a legitimate dream in the public only when they obey the most ordinary patterns of narrativity. On the other side of this spectrum there are kings, rulers. with a very free subjective content in which the dreamer is free to commit the most immoral deeds or to see the most weird things in the dream. It is hard to put the dreams of the arch-Sheikhs in this spectrum, some of them like Sheikh Safi al-Din and the dream Abu Hanifa the initiator of Hanafi school of Sunnis (He saw himself grubbing out the bones of the Prophet from his grave) are dreams with a very subjective content and some of them like Imām Shāfeʾī the initiator of Shāfeʾī tradition (Sonnat) of Islam –which most of the Sonnis in Kurdistan are the followers of these two traditions- are very ordinary dreams specially the latter one literally follows the pattern of ‘Papa Gives Water’ ^[38].

The dreams of the kings as the one who is in an immediate communication with God through his aura or farrah has the most subjective weight comparable to a modern artist in the new era who are attributed to special authenticity, integrity and power (cf. Kuspit: 2). In the stories the dream of a king is -regardless of his righteousness – authentic^[39]. A king is able to be himself in a way that is impossible for other people. He is able to experience seemingly without mediation, what is fundamental or original in experience. His position is like the position of Nietzsche’s overman or superman (Übermensch) which is the only model for self-transmutation and self-transfiguration and all nuances of the same trans-valuation (cf. Kuspit: 9). Meanwhile, a dream as an experience for a normal subject is thoroughly shaped and permeated by the conventions that mediate it. All of these conventions are tabled in the dream manuals but the interpretation of a kingly dream could not be found in the dream manuals while the king’s subject is sharply differentiated and elevated above his subjects. Then the king as an extraordinary subject, needs his own special ‘old wise man’ to come and interpret his dream. He like Alexander needs his own khidr and khābgozār,the one who knows the occult corridors who connects the world of night-dreams to our day-time.

In short, there is a free domain for subjectivity in the dream narratives of the kings and arch-sheikhs: those who are in an immediate communication with truth and almighty God through farrah (Royal Aura) or their noble blood. Even in this domain, the meta-narrative, in which the dream should be sited remains stereotypical. Again the ‘True Self’ of the king as a dreamer becomes standardized into a stereotype that is into a meta-narrative usually narrated for the kingly dreams. In this meta-narrative, there is always a king who saw a weird disturbed dream. A dream that would be neglected from its very morning if it were seen by a normal subject as a un-interpretable meaningless dream but the flow chart of this kind of dream for a king or ruler is as follows:

1-The king sees a disturbing warning dream.

2-He narrates it for his Vizier, wife or someone who is close to him in his court.

3-They start to give him some calming advices but the King insists for a deeper meaning for his dream.

4-He orders to search for a ‘wise man’ who knows the discipline of the dreams and can decode the symbolic language of his dream.

5-True interpreter would be examined and checked by his knowledge. (For example he should be able to narrate the king’s dream without having heard it before as a sign for its true connection to the other side and the world of occult (gheyb).)

6-Unskilled interpreters would be executed or receive punishment.

7-After a while appears a true interpreter (for example one who not only knows what he has seen but also can remind him those parts that he has forgotten. )

8- He proves himself as an ‘old wise man’.

9-After all these preliminaries comes the interpretation that would come true because it is written on the protected tablet of fate (loh-I mahfouẓ).

10- The old wise man outlines the danger and the way (if any) to come out of the danger.

The dream of Pharaoh obeys this pattern^[40] and many other dreams seen by a despotic king follow also the same algorithm.

But stories like this have even an older model in the book of Genesis. The story told about the birth of Abraham the founder of Abrahamian religions has exactly the same story-line:

The story is about the biblical king Nimrod, the man of power on earth and the erector of the Babel tower into sky. In the night of Abraham’s birth, Nimrod saw a very frightening dream. The true interpretation of this dream was a foretell of his dethronement by this new-born baby but the interpreters dare not to share this to him and tried to gloss it over by relating it to non-interpretable dreams that are caused by bodily conductions (what is called اضغاث الاحلام in Islamic tradition of dreams) but Nimrod did not be fooled by such tricks and insisted for a true interpretation. Rumi has written on this in his Mathnavi:

وآن طبیب و آن منجم در لمع

دید تعبیرش بپوشید از طمع

گفت دور از دولت و از شاهیت

که درآید غصه در آگاهیت

از غذای مختلف یا از طعام

طبع شوریده همی‌بیند منام

That physician and that astronomer saw by intuition the interpretation but concealed it of greed said: “Might sorrow be away from the throne and crown of your royalty, It is because of eating scattered opposing foods that one sees scattered disturbed dreams.” (Mathnavi, vol. IV, part 91)

The story of Nimrod could be very referential and illustrative to our points because not only it is a story about Abraham and Nimrod, that is two archetypical figures of faith and tyranny but also it is about the essential rivalry that exists between the king’s palace or divān made of stone and divān as a palace made of words:

The collapse of Nimrod’s tower is coincident with the arbitrariness of language. On the opposite side of Nimrod as the big loser stands Abraham as the one who has preserved the archaic original language that was gave by god to human beings. To be a prophet means to be in a discursive relation with god. Talking with god by itself is a spiritual ascension and belongs to the domain of dream and poetry. Making a palace (divān) on hand of political authority lies is in an ontological opposition with the palace of a poet built in his divān or book of poems. The poet here is the one who knows every trick of language. He is in the position of the one who ccan make confuse instead of being confused and to him the words have preserved their archaic sound in ear and in this respect a poet is comparable to a prophet^[41]:

هر لحظه وحی آسمان آید به سر جان ها

آخر چو دردی بر زمین تا چند می باشی؟ برآ!

Every moment comes a revelation from the sky:

“Don’t you realize that you are suffering on the earth? Ascend!”

Again, it is in this story that Nimrod ordered to throw Abraham into fire and the fire changed into a nice garden for Abraham:

در آتش رو در آتش رو در آتشدان ما خوش رو

که آتش با خلیل ما کند رسم گلستانی

نمی‌دانی که خار ما بود شاهنشه گل‌ها

نمی‌دانی که کفر ما بود جان مسلمانی

Go inside the fire, go inside the fire, go easily into our fire-brazier

As fire behaves like a garden to our friend (Abraham= khalīl ollah or friend of god is the epithet of Abraham)

Didn’t you know that our bramble is the king of flowers?

Didn’t you know that our paganism is the soul of Islam? (Rumi, divān-I kabir, Nr. 2508).

Abraham cast into fire by Nimrod;

Zubdat-al Tawarikh in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul, dedicated to Sultan Murad III in 1583. Upper image: Abraham preparing to sacrifice Ishmael (Muslims believe that Ishmael not Isaac was almost sacrificed). The angel appears with the ram at right. Lower image: Abraham miraculously unharmed after being cast into fire, watched by Nimrod at the right.

It is also in this story that the Babel tower as the physical embodiment of the social pyramid becomes ruined and at the same time the languages of the people became scattered. A highly regarded Jewish historian from the 1^st century A.D. named Titus Flavius Josephus had interesting things to say about King Nimrod:

…He (god) caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion…(Josephus: 96).

Here is the point in which the archaic language changes into many different kind of arbitrary languages (that is different system of significations that arbitrarily relates each ‘word’ to each ‘thing’.)

Nimrod is also one of the outstanding figures in the Divine Comedy of Dante. In Dante’s visit of the Hell, Nimrod forms a ring surrounding the central pit of Hell guarding the ninth circle of Hell, a ring that Dante from a distance mistakes as a series of towers. Nimrod was shouting “Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi“ (Dante’s Inferno, XXXI.67.) : A verse whose literal meaning is uncertain and usually left untranslated: It has a meaningful meaningless: A sign of the confusion of the languages caused by the fall of the Tower of Babel.

Construction of the Tower of Babel, painting, 1563, painted by Pieter Brüghel the Elder (1526 – 1569) (The Kunshistorisches Museum in Vienna, Inv.-Nr. GG_1026)

There is a long list of the king’s dream both in Iranian Zoroastrian mythology and also in the bible and accordingly in Iranian oral and written literature which follows this synopsis. We will confront even more dreams of this type in the following pages and a reader who is accustomed with Kurdish and Persian stories can remind many similar parallel examples from the old historical books who are usually mixed with oral narratives and mythology. To bring just few examples, one can think of the dream of Rabiʿa ibn Nasr al-Lachmi al-Himyari interpreted by Saṭiḥ ( see Schimmel: 48-9), and also the dream of the despot Bokhtolnaṣr whose confrontation with Dāniyel the prophet as the interpreter of his dream which completely fits with the mentioned pattern of the king’s dream and is renarrated in various Arabic and Persian books (i.e Damirī, Ḥayāt al-Ḥeyvān^[42], vol. I, 313 and also in Ibn-i Sirin: 27-31). Interestingly the same story is believed to be happen between the Iranian translator of the Dāniyel’s book of dreams, Khalil-i Iṣfahāni and the Abbasid caliph al–Mahdi (reigned between 775-785) whose dream has is very similar to the dream seen by Bokhtolnaṣr ^[43](Ibn-Sirin: 37-39). Ibn-Sirin that this story in narrated in his book is also believed who has experienced a similar life story of Joseph the prophet.

In fact the story of Joseph is very popular and favorite among the Kurds and versions of it appears in the folk stories for example the Kurdish folkloric story of basket-seller (zanbil-froroush) has strongly influenced by the story of Joseph (Ayoubiyan, 1966: 42). In fact Joseph is an icon of saintliness whose piety was checked with many hard examinations along his lifetime and it is logical for the ordinary people to think of the same events and examinations that should happen for everyone who has paced in the way of devoutness and Godliness and is enlightened and privileged with the science of dreams and occult (ʿilm-I gheyb wa ʿilm-I royā). This would be fully examined in another article but for the time being it suffices to know how self-similar are the dream stories of the kings although the content of these dream-stories look superficially different.

An approximate pattern is also repeated in the dreams of every king in Shahnāmeh, the book of the kings regardless a fair or a despot king. Even Ibn-Sirin believes that Ḍaḥāk, the despotic king of Medes who we know him from the first part of my dissertation was the first who drop a serious look into the science of the dreams (nokhostin kasi ke dar ʿilm khāb negaresh kard) (Ibn-Sirin: 7).

And the dream of many despotic kings who became informed of the birth of Mohammad as a new prophet among the Arabs for example the dream of Rabiʿa ibn Naṣr al-Lackmi al-Himyari who asked both Saṭiḥ and Shigh, two prominent oracles (kāhin) of their time. These two oracles not only narrate the dream of the king as a proof of their mastership on the science of dreams but also interpret it as the birth of the most important prophet that has ever come (Damirī, Ḥayāt al-Ḥeyvān, vol. II, 73-74 ) The Iranian example of this kind of dream comes right after this dreams in the book of Damirī and this time it goes with a crack on the arch of the palace of Kasrā which frightened Anoushiravān,^[44] the king of Iran and forefather of Khosro Parviz and again the same pattern of narrativity comes hereafter but this time the reason is not a dream but an accident that was taken as a bad omen but the one who interpreted this accident correctly is again Saṭḥ (ibid: 74-75) that foretells the rise of a new prophet from the Arabs. A similar story is reported for Khosro Parviz the king of Iran of the time in which Mohammad has already revealed his prophethood.

As a rule, the interpretation of a kingly dream is not to be found in the usual ordinary dream manuals and they need an extraordinary oracle and ‘old wise man’ who understands the language of ‘sublime’ but even when the normal people are regarded as too ordinary to comprehend the symbolism (if any) behind these dreams ( that is to understand how extraordinary could be to be a king) they are obligated to be his audience in the homage of his extra-ordinariality. That is they are obligated to circulate their dream narratives in the form of that very cliché used for the kingly dreams even if they can make no sense of its strange language.

By considering the frames and story-lines of the kings’ dreams, one can conclude that these narratives are again doomed to be narrated in that very cliché’ of bābā āb dād with this difference that the appearance of bābā, the “old wise man” (and āb, (water) as a metaphor for knowledge^[45] or advise) is juxtaposed to the reality i.e. the old wise man appears in the form of a dream expert in the daytime and gives the king some advices for overcoming the problem that should be happened in warned in the dream. The first story of Rumi’s Mathnavi , “The Story of the King and his Maiden” (dāstān-i Shāh wa Kanizak) depicts this relation between the king and the ‘old wise man’ and its importance in the symbolic literature of Sufis^[46] (It is notable that the Rumi’s book of Mathnavi starts with this story). In this story the king saw an ‘old wise man’ in his dream and this old wise man redirects him again to an ‘old wise man’ that would be appear in reality and in the day-time, helping him to overcome his problem^[47]:

..When from his inmost depths he raised a scream

The sea of bounty surged and sent a dream:

An old man then appeared whose voice was deep:

‘Greetings. Your wish is granted, humble king,

Tomorrow to your aid our man we’ll bring,

Trust him, as one who’s mastered how to cure,

Accept his word for he’s sincere and pure,

Witness amazing magic and applaud,

See in his temperament the might of God.’

The next day came, the promised meeting neared,

The sun shone bright, the stars has disappeared,

The king gazed from the watchtower eagerly

To see what had been promised secretly,

Beyond the crowd he saw a virtuous one,

Among the shadows he was like a sun!

Just like a crescent moon he came to view-

A non-existent image seen by you,

In form existing only in one’s mind-

The world is turned by forces of this kind:

(Rumi , Oxford translation of Mathnavi (translated by Mojaddedi): 8)

The borders between this world and the world of prophesying dreams is eroded and according to the status of the person and its spiritual level the amount of this erosion is different. For kings and Sheikhs this level of erosion is high and hence it is normal that part of a dream happens in the reality and in the daytime. Rumi in the next verse concludes:

Nistvash bāshad khīyāl andar jahān

To jahānī bar khīyālī bin rawān

Dream in this world is based on nothingness

See the world fleeting like a dream

The true dreamer of this dreamy outer world is the king or Sultan who rules on it and hence it is logical to see his mentor in flesh and in the day-time just self-similar to the night dreams of his subjects.

In all these narratives the world or the country(molk, mamlekat, …) is a dark traumatic abyss (ẓolamāt) that the king as its ruler is obligated to confront with it by committing correct royal decisions. It hides somewhere in itself a water resource like a treasure and to reach this water or eternal light of knowledge in the darkness of the world he need to recourse a pir or an old wise man. According to the Sufis way of life, this is the meta-narrative of every human being notwithstanding a king or a subject . At the beginning of the so called story of the king and his maiden, that is nearly at the beginning of the Mathnawi, Rumi writes:

Beshnavid ey doustān in dāstān

Khod ḥaqiqat naghd-i ḥāl-i māst ān

Now here’s a tale for you to contemplate

It tells the truth about your present state (ibid, v. 35)

This meta-narrative —in which a pupil is metaphorically considered as a king and his spiritual master as his vizier in the gesture of an ‘old wise man’—is abstracted in its best in the story of Alexandra and his survey for the water of life in which Khizr is his wise companion. In the allegoric language of Sufis every human being is the Alexander of the country of his body (molk-i tan) which is full of darkness and satanic temptations. Then to have control on this country, he/she needs a mentor to guide him/her to the resource of life which is deep inside in the heart (and in fact in a very tiny point on this heart known as ser-i soweidā (literally: the darkest secret)).

Then, the words ‘father’, ‘water’ and ‘giving’ and their solid relation phrased in Bābā āb dād is perhaps the most essential bonded structure for a transcendental Persianate dream or at least for the Kurdish dreams in a Sufi milieu in which all the main elements of this meta-narrative of human life on the earth -which is itself a dream- is compacted. Proof of this is but based just on an “inductive inference” tried here to be verified through a short review on the major oral and literal narratives among the Kurds. Any other scholar can either validate or violate this thesis by adding supporting parallel examples or contradicting ones from the heard stories or dream narratives from the region. As stated, there is no other logical implement other than induction and also no way to an absolute proof of this statement and there is even no need for it. The main aim of this study is just to show that how dreams which are related to ‘sainthood’ are structured and ordered through a hidden sanity so that there are just few models and forms -above all Bābā āb dād- in which the dreams are forecasted dream notwithstanding the intentionality of their dreamers. If a dream structure does not match with this forecasted forms of narrativity it would be recognized as a false dream by a native ear. This does not means that these narrative forms pigeonhole every dream but every dream with a highly subjective content would be automatically wiped out from the public discourse as a false impression named with aḍġāf o aḥlām. One can simply conclude that every dream which is highly doped with subjectivity is politically dangerous and should be rejected as it secretly addresses a kingly dream and as the probability for a normal subject for becoming a king is not null it should be harshly disregarded and degraded. Then as we see, the social pyramid and the position of the dreamer in this pyramid has the most determining role in the society’s attitude toward a dream regardless of its content.

The homogeneity of the dream narratives is possibly a result of the tacit censorship of the later hearer of a ‘different’ dream seen by someone of the ‘same’ social class. The high subjectivity embedded in such a dream would be not born by other ‘subjects’. In the same manner every out-of-form narrative who claims to be a revelation would be rejected because they do not fulfill the pre-known structure of a true dream^[48] where the homogeneiety or sterotypicallity of these pre-known structures are themselves a result of the tacit censorship of the later bearers of the early traditions whose process of selection among different kinds of narrativities was not in a random fashion (cf. Lambreaux: 104). But still the matter is not that easy.

Now it is time to construct a structural analysis from/of the dream narratives in contrast to the categorical approach of Grunebaum adopted by many other scholars. In this approach we may sort the dreams from the amount of subjectivity that it explicitly contains or claims to have. The more a dream obeys the synopsis and narrative structure of the known dreams in the hagiographies, the less is the amount of its subjectivity. In such dreams, although the narrative is still working as an ego-document but the ego is camouflaged and invisible. On the other hand a full subjective dream could be considered as a very pretentious, ambitious and challenging specially when being narrated from a person of a lower class. Such a dreams, to speak general, have no chance for publicity in a Persianate society in which the personal individuality (and accordingly its subjective thoughts and imaginations) are not celebrated and hence will be wiped out from the social scene and are unable to reproduce themselves in a token ring of narratives circulating in public. They may be responded with discriminating answers like “What has you eaten last night?” to lessen or gloss over its (unallowable) subjectivity to a biological cause like gluttony instead of something spiritual (See film#1, min…). Then most of these dreams will be marked as an aḍġāf o aḥlām with this exception that it have been seen by a King or a powerful ruler and sometimes by a high status personality like a Sheikh. As stated above, there are many examples for clichéd stories webbed around the original dream-stories seen by a king in the verbal and written literature of the region. In spite of these privatized dreams, there remains a big bulk of dreams that have a very small space for maneuver in their line of story. According to the argumentations of this book, the social class of the dreamer is the first imperative that determinates the mode of interpretation of a dream. To see an original unique dream, reflects the uniqueness of its dreamer and his matchless personality.

An out-of-genre dream is rarely acceptable from a normal ‘subject’ by the society. The high amount of individuality and subjective content belongs to the realm of the kings and rulers and the subjects rarely have a chance to find an ear for their subjective dreams, they would be marked as non-interpretable and would be failed to be circulated in the society. Just like a note of money, a dream narrative should be recognized and evaluated as authentic by the community to be able to be narrated. Then and somehow subconsciously and subliminally, a dream narrative drops in the most ordinary known structure of narrativity: Bābā āb dād. In this formula the ego is camouflaged because the narrative format is the most ordinary but the dream itself is recognized as something seen by its dreamer, then the dream as a whole is an ego-document. This does not mean that a king does not see a dream of this structure and through this formula in which the ego is normatively camouflaged and is mostly used by his own subjects. In a ‘short term society’ like Iran (See Katouzian, 2003 to know more about this term) the rhythm of succession and the length of dynasties are too short and hence, it might be quite normal for a king to see an ordinary dream like his subjects^[49] but it is probably not a good political decision to narrate it for the public because it would harm his royal aura or farrah (an Iranian mythological term used to denote the Royal Charisma or heavenly mandate). The dream of a real charismatic king (farahmand) should be beyond the reach of ordinary dream theories and symbolification written in usual dream manuals. It is also a matter of prestige to find an unordinary old mentor whereof the dream should be correctly interpreted. As farrah or aura (politically charisma) of a king symbolizes his immediate communication with God. A king (like a poet or an artist )is more uncannily objective than his people, for in pushing his dream-content to the fore he is insisting that there is something more fundamental in experience than any symbolization available before: something that every symbolization assumes. The three dreams of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last king of Iran, are conflated with supernatural events which obey the most ordinary form of narrativity of bābā āb dād:

In 1961, or some thirty-five years after the typhoid incident, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, published a book called “Mission For My Country” [Maʾmouriyat barāyi Watanam]. In this book, he reminisced about his childhood and youth. He recalled that while hovering between life and death during his bout of typhoid, he had “entered into a special spiritual or holy realm”. The sacred realm that Mohammad-Reza entered into was itself n the mysterious world of dreams, in which individuals have claimed encounters with holy figures. After more than three decades, Mohammad-Reza remembered the fine details of his exceptional childhood experience… he wrote, he had seen Imam ʾAli sitting next to him …Imam ʾAli, the Shah recalled, held a bowl in his hand as he sat at Mohammad-Reza’s bedside and ordered him to drink the liquid in it…The next day Mohammad-Reza is on the road to recovery…(Rahnema: 116-117 cf. Pahlavi:50-51)

During the same year, 1926…Mohammad-Reza had a second supernatural “personal experience”… He recounted that as he toppled from the saddle, Hazzrat-e Abolfazl (ʾAbbas), the valiant and glorious son of Imam ʾAli, appeared to him and gave him a bowl of water that cured him from his hazardous head injury. (Pahlavi: 51)

By narrating these stereotypical dreams that belongs to the people of a lower class he perhaps loses part of his Royal aura or farrah (charisma in Iranian mythology) for those very Shie’ believers who he was intended to show his sympathy to them by narrating such dreams.

All of his dreams obey the most ordinary form of narrative which implicitly signals his lack of farrah, and portrayed him as a king who gives blackmail to his subject instead of following his royal subjectivity , then there is no wonder that he lost his throne and crown for a more charismatic character like Imam Khomeini.

Imam Khomeini was the true return of the Shah’s dream. The true materialization of gerontocracy in the flesh of an old man (with the epithet of pir-i Jamārān) because of the guilty feeling that he had for the patricide of this traditional system of authority. A primordial sin that he should commit it to be able to fulfill his ‘mission’(reaching his country to the level of a modern society or in his own words: to the great gates of civilization (darwāzehāyi bozorgi tamadon)). What has happened in the revolution of 1979 was not a simple replacement of kingdom with clergism but a replacement of Sultanism for one of the former systems of traditional authority (see Weber: 175 ff.) . This system (along with patriarchal) was never far from Sultanism. A sultan sometimes needs the help of an old mentor to show him the way out of the crisis. In such cases, the administrative relicts of patriarchal and gerontocrat systems (i.e. anjoman-I rish-sefidān) always provide him an ‘old wise man’ . This archetypical character set the ruler (as well as the dreamer) in harmony with his past and future by giving him some proper advice for a better administration:

Weber’s Classification of Authority Systems

Charismatic Traditional Legal

Patriarchal Patrimonial Gerontocracy

Sultanism

Then, a sultan can never set himself free from those bonds that bind him to the older systems of governance and hence, every conscious call for an ‘old wise man’ or real manifestation of him, could be considered as a symptom for the so-called primordial sin or patricide, that is diminution of the contribution of patrimonialsm and gerontocratic institutions in power and politics. Seeing him in dream is even more symptomic and reveals the limiting behavior of this symptom. Never before in the history of Iran this feeling of guilt was so high. This overwhelming departure from the older traditional systems for authority finally returns in the form of a revolutionary triumph over a system that had ruled for more than two and half millennium.

Then, the main reason for the persistency of the Bābā āb dād formula may rest in the persistency of the this social pyramid as stationary model of authority which itself rests on some older models. In other words, Sultanism has preserved its all-days connectivity with its older forms of authority such as gerontocrasy and patriarchy and then, It is possible that the persistence of the ‘old wise man’ figure is just a reflection of a primordial sin or a relict or nostalgia for an older primordial system of governance ‘patricided’ through this new model.

Before the modern time there was rarely a romantic look into the tribal morality. This romantic look is a modern product of democratic pressures from inside and outside that pushed the Shah to think of a romantic balance between egoism and collectivism. Finding this romantic solution was a very dangerous endeavor that he paid its cost with his crown. He has unconsciously revealed, due his dreams and parallel discourses like that, that he has a very low run for the self-expressive and unique emotional life that a king should follow and with this, he unwillingly added fuel to the primordial tension that exists between a shah and his subjects, to say, the inconsistency that exists between the egoism and collectivism or between the domination and submission. This will for relegation or degrading the huge distance that exists between a king and his subjects is reflected in the title of his book: “Mission For My Country”. He positioned himself as a hero as well as a missioner at the very beginning of his book who has drunk water from the bowl of Islamic sainthoods in his dreams and visions. In his faith, he is selected to fight with the fate to serve a better life for his country and people but the way that he has started his book -that is by narrating such ordinary dreams- he has diminished his royal aura in a very unrecoverable way by playing as if he belongs to the masses and has submitted himself to the welfare of his own country through a religious mission that is to sacrifice himself for a higher collective cause in a similar causality that once ruled on the fate of Hazzrat-e Abolfazl^[50] (bringing water for his thirsty people and children and being sacrificed in the way back and so on…). Hence, he has taken a very exaggerated romantic attitude toward his subjects and also through what he meant by the word ‘mission’. The dreams portrayed him as an ordinary servant simply because he has dreamt like a very ordinary subject. This mission that dressed him in a servant ‘uniform’ of his own servants and country was a very bad strategic position that finally gave a counter upheaval to his symbolic position as a king.

To sum, in contrast to all these evidences we can still talk about the stereotypical nature of dreams in a Persianate milieu -but not because that a just king should behave according to the rules of Shariah or issues like that, but mostly- because of the way that even the kingly dreams are doomed to be framed in the body of a bigger clichéd story because a king or sultan is himself entangled in a system of authority that firmly and administratively relates him to an ‘old wise man’ (gerontocracy for our case in point).

The classification of dreams is a matter of social class

Har kasi la khaw bevina morgh o māsi

Saey agey pawshāhi

The one who sees a bird or a fish in a dream

His head will reach to the royal [crown]

—A Kurdish proverb^[51]

Now it is time to return back to our first critic on Edgar’s notion on the scriptive nature of the Islamic dreams. he wrote that “a dream should not advocate immoral action as defined by the Quran and the hadiths” (Edgar: 33).Although this notion correctly reflects the stereotypical nature of Islamic dreams through a Reductio ad absurdum way of logic (borhān-i kholf) but what he wrote as a key criterion to establish the interpretability of a dream is somehow misleading: From one side, it is true that committing an immoral act because of a dream is not a fine excuse for example one cannot say that ”I saw Mohammad in my dream and he allowed me to drink alcohol.” But, on the other side, this prohibition should not put a shadow on the importance and meaningfulness of the dreams in which an immoral act is committed. There are many dreams that are quite interpretable in Islam although their content are far immoral (in general to see having forbidden sex i.e. with mother, sister-in-law, animal^[52] etc. which most of them are interpreted as glad tidings (cf. Ibn-Sirin: 129-130) see also interview #…) the dream of the forefather of Sallahidin Ayoubi who saw himself urinating on a holy place was also subjected to interpretation with this positive meaning that one of his grand-sons would become a great conqueror of Islam.

Then Edgar’s criterion for interpretability of a dream could be misleading. As an instant conclusion and in contrast to Edgar’s criterion, the key directive in interpretation of a dream is in the first place the question of “who has dreamed?” regardless of “What has been dreamt?” or if it is compatible with Quran and hadiths and so on… in fact this is not a first consideration of the dreamer’s modality and state of mind but rather of his/her status and social class.

The examples of this ‘rank’ of dreams are many in which the most imaginable tabooed deed in Islam such as shitting in Masjid ol Ḥarām is interpretable if just seen by a person from a royal blood. In the hagiographies there are many examples in which the skill of the interpreter is tested by sending a dummy person to the interpreter partly because the true dreamer , mostly a prominent, was likely to remain anonymous as he/she was ashamed to narrate his/her dream because of its discreditable content (Schimmel: 50). This is also like the way that the kings used to testify the true oracles by asking them to recite his dream as a testifying precondition of their skillfulness. Just like the stories narrated about the dreams of the kings in the folk stories, there is a long list of these records in Islamic narratology that again, the oldest forms of them are to be found in the dream book of Ibn-i Sirin (ibid). Most of these narratives are added after the time of Ibn-i Sirin into his book as Ibn-i Sirin was a personality from the era of the early Islam but some of these narratives are of some centuries after his time^[53]. This is a very usual task that mostly happened in the written literature of a land in which the oral literature is dominant and in many ways takes its privilege and override on the written literature. This fact that these dreams are mostly collected in Ibn-i Sirin’s dream-book is for the discussions of this book of the highest importance because his book is almost the only book of dreams used in Kurdistan with a very big popularity and as we will see in these records, the issue of blood is addressed as the key point of interpretation and this at least proves that our insistence on blood concerns in the last was not pointless and we were not disoriented from our main topic. Anyway, most of this kind of dreams contain an immoral part that could not be seen by a servant or a person of a lesser blood.

In the dreams No. 20, 46, 144, 176 in the Roman version of Ibn-i Sirin’s book (Brackertz: 33, 45, 106, 139 f.) the dreams are recognized as the dream of a ‘master’ and not of the ‘servant’ who came originally to the interpreter simply because his/her master were ashamed of the dream-content. All of the dreams of this kind have a shameful, formidable or snobbish part regarding the public morality and this is exactly the code that guides a skilful interpreter from a fake down-scale dreamer to the true visitor of the dream of a noble royal blood or from someone with a “blood of a caliph”.

In dream no. 46 the fake person said that I saw in my dream that I drank all the water of Tigris out. Ibn-i Sirin told him that you will see your master, the true dreamer of this dream, dead when go back to him. A dream that again links water with death and power.

In dream no. 20, the Khalife saw all of his hair fallen except his pubic hairs.

In dream No. 46 Maʾmun the caliph saw himself urinating in two and shitting in the two other corners of the holy place of maghām-i Ibrāhim in Mecca. Again and because of this sinful dream he shamed to ask ibn-i Sirin by himself for its interpretation and hence he sent a dummy person to him and Ibn-i Sirin answered that this dream has no interpretation because the blood of this person was not of a caliph. First when Maʾmun came to him, he revealed the true meaning of the dream that was a dream of succession: Two from his sons would become his succession of throne. The same structure of narrative is believed to be happened for the forefather of ṣalāḥ ol-Din Ayoubi the Kurd warrior of Islamic army in the middle centuries. This time, as described before, the sinful deed was urinating on a holy place that again was interpreted as a dream of successful succession of his sons (Langner: 76 f.). Right after recounting the story-line of this dream Barbara Langner has affiliated it with its interpretation according to Ibn-i Sirin’s book of dream. An explanation that accords with historical facts and records. She also explains the way that we are confronting a master pattern of allegorical dreams that is ever reappeared in Muslim’s tradition of dream interpretation from the 3^rd to the 10^th century AD which at least in the form that they are represented or perfomed (Darbietung) has rarely changed in the course of time. She also refers all of the interpretations back to Ibn-i Sirin as the father of the art of dream interpretation in Arabic literature (Langner: 77 see also Fahd: 312)

The same pattern of narrativity with a very sinful deeds (grubbing out the bones of the Prophet from his grave) is also detectable among the old hagiographies of the arch sheikh and Imam, abu Hanifa the initiator of ḥanafi school of Suniis ( see Taḏkirat ol-Oliyā of Attar under Abou Hanifa, cf. new version of this story narrated by the Turk author Cemel Anadol via Schimmel: 51). Interestingly the interpreter of this dream is again Ibn-i Sirin.

Then as we see in a more or less similar formulation of Émile Durkheim (Religion is society worshiping itself) “a sinful dream is society’s pyramid reconfirming itself”. Through a sinful dream the social classes of a society will found an extra chance to reconfirm itself and to hold its ground. Just like the daytime, the world of dream is stratified in which just the class of privileged are allowed to do something privileged and subversive. To intrude the issues of class in the Oriental dreams is perhaps something overlooked in the former categorizations done for the Oriental dreams. In Oriental societies at least in those that categorized as ‘water monopoly empire’ or ‘hydraulic states^[54]’ the pyramid of the society is the most visible thing around. So visible and concrete that one may forget it in its abundance. In CHAPTER 1-2 of my dissertation under the title of ĀB (=water), it was shown how the canals of water (Ghanāt) sketch the irreversible lines of power that flows from those who have control on water to their subjects. This visible reified form of pyramid has even reproduced its visibility among the dervishes in many way and aspects. For example on the Shajare hanged on the wall or even in the arrangement of the tea glasses on the tray and in the tea time between two parts of majlisi samāʿ or zikr . This tray of teas for example is an objective form of the hierarchical relation between a sheikh and his murids so that the tea of the sheikh is on the top of other glasses with a saucer and the other tea glasses which symbolize the murids are set equally underneath without saucer.

Then and parallel to the omnipresent appearance of the society’s pyramid, the categorization of dreams constructs itself in two major classes:

1. The subjective dreams of the rulers, kings, sheikhs and the poets who as a result of their occupation are more free to see and express what they see perhaps because of mutual bribery that the language (and literature as its fruit) and the political power usually give to each other. (This is the known issue of how the ‘words of power’ uses the ‘power of words’ and all the discussions of the Frankfort school that every kind of discourse is power-oriented in essential and so on…)It might be helping to denote that the word for literature in Persian is adabiyāt which literally means morality which reflects the author’s authority on morality.
2. Ordinary dreams of the ordinary people and of the king’s subjects in which every subjective content would be automatically and tacitly censored because they found rarely an ear^[55].

For both of these classes of ‘castellated’ and ‘castrated’ dreams, seeing an authentic ‘true’ dream is a space for “subject formation”: A king enjoys this space to revitalize his ‘temper’ and ego by probing the content of his subjective mind and subjecting his crazy dreams -with immoral contents- to interpretation and on the other hand an ordinary ‘subject’ is allowed to use this space for the formation of that very “moral subject” that he/she was before (See Butler, 2005).

In the same manner, there are stereotypical stories about the poets who saw their next work or masterpiece first in a dream. In fact the poets like Nāli are somehow allowed to see subjective dreams like a despot king and there is no wonder to see these two interrelated as the (will of) power will always to hide itself under the cloak of beautiful words ( See the book of Koschorke & Kaminskig (2011), ‘Despoten dichten’ on the ontological relation between despotism and poetry and accordingly the relation between the autocrats and authors …).

Then the key directive that decides the mode of interpretation is the social class of the dreamer which automatically determines the narrative structure that he should take for the dream. It should pass to the suite of legitimated forms established for the subjects. In short: Seeing a fully subjective crazy dream is allowed for everyone but they are interpretable just when seen by a ruler that is one who is able to make his ‘temporality’ into ‘historicity’.

The differences between the subjective dreams of a king (and poets with some level of caution) and his subjects could be summarized in a table like this^[56]:

The books of interpretation: the handbook for maintenance of the automated mind of a subject

Khāb-I Khargoush-I bad.andish to khosh chandānast

Ke Ibn-I Sirin-I ghaḍā dam nazanad az taʾwil

The Rabitt-like sleep/dream of your enemy (allegory of its unawareness) is so deep

That there is no need for Ibn-i Sirin (allegory of the interpreter) of the decreed (ghaḍā) to give an interpretation for it.

—Anvari (from Anjoman-ārāyi Nāṣeri)

The main discussion of this long essay was about the reflection of the social classes in the interpretative tradition of dreams in an Islamic context and also on the direct, firm and ‘tit for tat’ relation that exists between the appearance of a “thing” in a dream and what it symbolizes according to Quran and hadiths. This makes the methods taken for the interpretation of dreams very literal, scriptural and straightforward so that the interpreter directly defines the meaning of the dream according to the text of Quran and hadiths, irrespective of the way that the dreamer him/herself may think about it. It is mostly supposed that the dreamer is also a religious ‘believer’ otherwise it does not make sense to come to a dream expert in Islamic tradition. To be a believer and Muslim means to be obedient to the Law of Islam. This is the key point that makes the interpretation of a dream possible and authentic mostly irrespective of its dreamer as an individual. The dreamer as a Muslim- and in appropriation to his/her faith and devotion to Quran and Islam- has already the key pattern of his/her dream as a ‘rebus’ in his/her mind or unconsciousness and the duty of the interpreter is to relocate every ‘flesh’ of this riddle with its proper ‘word’ and every ‘thing’ with its ‘name’. This allocation takes place in accordance to the sacred script and the dream look up tables which itself is organized in accordance to the Islamic scripts. Then all the dreams which are offshoot of humanistic individuality and subjective individualistic wishes (hawāhay-i nafsānī) would be automatically ‘foreclosed’ or glossed over. This kind of filtering bestowed this tradition of interpretation a stereotypical feature. Lambreaux has named and formulated this feature under the term ‘Homogeneity and Imitation’ both in the contours and contents of the early Muslim oneirocritic tradition as the characterization of the Muslim manuscript collection and system of Islamic system of dream interpretation. (see Lambreaux: 79 ff.). Then, one has every reason to talk of a single tradition of dream interpretation and to say that all of dream manuals are interpreted in largely the same fashion.

This stereotypicallity has found another name in the work of I. R. Edgar :”straightforwardness”. This is what that wonders him when he make a comparison between Oriental and Occidental approach (which to his argumentations is based on a more democratized methods without established interpretations) for understanding the message of a dream in many parts of his book i.e. :

A core difference I have found between Islamic and Western dream theories is in the tension between authoritative and facilitative interpretations. Islamic dream interpreters tend to tell the believer what the dream means based on their understanding of the Quran and the hadiths, which are perceived to contain all that humans need to know to live well, while certain Western dream interpretative traditions focus on facilitating the dreamer as an expert on his/her dreams. (Edgar: 117-118)

All the discussions above on the stereotypicallity , homogeneity and straightforwardness are in parallel to the scriptural nature dream manuals in a Persianate context and justifies the importance of a preliminary survey in the Persianate religious books. Now it is time to investigate that how the content of these dream manuals -which are supposed to be based on their understanding of the Quran and the hadiths- are organized in respect to the older religious scriptures^[57]. Are all of them extracted from Quranic texts? Or pre-Islamic culture of dreams have also a great contribution in this system of interpretation? The answer that is found here could be very astonishing which proves that how deeply these traditions are defined through their local roots. The main focus here is taken on the most famous dream in the world of Islam: Miʿrāj or the night dream of Mohmmad in which he has travelled from Mecca to Juraselem and from there on to heaven and again from there on back to Mecca through the same way and in fact all of this trans-cosmical voyage in a snap of a lid. This night journey of the Prophet is the most important night among the Kurds and just like the birthday of the prophet is celebrated every year (see films #…and …, interviews#…,#…).

By our survey in the structure of this meta-narrative, it will be shown that it obeys the grammatical rule of bābā āb dād and every dream of the followers of Mohammad is more or less an uneven copy of this narrative. Bābā āb dād is the most common (but not the only) formula that could be traced both in the most conventional dreams and meanwhile in the major parts of Iranian and accordingly Kurdish mythology and literature and historical accounts. This formula relates the terms of water and an “old wise man” archetype with a demand(niyāz) or a wish which is symbolized with water. Through the discussions of the first part of my dissertation there is a plausible geographic and technical determination that is responsible for the formation of this formula. The role of this deterministic agents will be supported by the following survey in which it will be shown that the bonded structure between these three issues is constructed far before Islam and beyond the Islamic issues: The narratology of the Kurdish dreams is rooted and derived mainly from pre-islamic Zoroastrian scripts.

In contrast to the functional methodology that shadows on the classifications done before on the dreams in a Persianate context, the method of this work -as explained in the first part- is more structural in this sense that it recognizes the common syntactical structures in these dreams that are shared in all five categories done by Grunebaum. In other words the syntax of a dream is independent from the intentions of its dreamer and the dreamer, -notwithstanding of her/his intentions- is obligated (mostly unconsciously) to forecast her/his dream in such a narrative form that is parallel to an authorized meta-narrative. This self-consistency of the dreams makes it impossible to evaluate their truth value from their overt content and hence the real intentions of the dreamer remains always hidden. Although this book retains its focus on just one of these syntactical forms namely ‘Bābā āb dād’. This formula of course is not the only formula of a huge amount of dream material but it is perhaps the most used and useful formula for revealing the hidden interconnectivity between those common elements in different narratives that may look very distinct from each other at the first look.

Hence, the approach of this work is towards the syntax or “generative grammar” of the dreams to classify the superabundant dream material while most of the other approaches are more or less have focused their functional look on the content of the dreams. This radical turn of focus from “what it says” toward “How it says” is very fundamental and determines a minimum methodology of their interpretation and more importantly a new system for their classification.

According to this argumentation an ‘ Islamic Kurdish dream’ is not free from its context and -although it ‘speaks’ with Islamic words but- obeys the same syntax of dreams and narratives of the pre-Islamic religious books that itself has a foot in geographical determinism and the water culture of the region, discussed in the first part of the dissertation. It is very rare if not impossible to find a historical record or religious book in a Persianate society without a dream narrative. A full historical review of these narratives is surely out of the scope of this thesis.

This research could be continied by revisiting the revitalization and rebirth of the pre-Islamic narrative forms in the Islamic dream narratives would be examined and to do this it will start its survey from a short review of the dreams accounted in the pre-Islamic religious books such as Avestā, Ardavirāf-nāme, Kārnāme Ardeshir-i Bābakān, Zand va Houman Yashan.

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1. Esmaeilpour Ghoochani, Iraj (2017): Bābā Āb Dād: The phenomenology of sainthood in the culture of dreams in kurdistan with an emphasis on sufis of qāderie brotherhood. Dissertation, LMU München: Fakultät für Philosophie, Wissenschaftstheorie und Religionswissenschaft. URL: https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21528/ ↑
2. “Symbolic function” is a term suggested by Levi- Strauss in his thesis on The Elementrary Structures of Kinship in 1947 and can be lightly taken as “the name of the Father” in the terminology of Lacan. Lacan inspired from Levi-Strauss argues that what organizes the imaginary register [accordingly the structure of unconsciousness]are the rules of symbolic function, rather than the actual father( Zafiropoulos & Holland: 18). ↑
3. “Symbolic order” is another Lacanian concept which is equivalent to Levi-Strauss’s “order of culture” mediated through/in language. The unconscious is the discourse of the “Other” and thus belongs to the symbolic order (“other” with capital O is Lacan’s short writing for “the outer world”). A dream-narrative is doubly connected to this realm as it belongs both to unconsciousness and language. ↑
4. In the 20th anecdote of the 5th chapter of Golistān of the famous poet Saadī there is the story of the judge of Hamedān who was arrested in his bed when he was drunk and committing sodomy with a young boy. Each of these crimes suffice an execution. The Sultan decided to throw him down from a high building but the judge asked for a last defense which was kindly accepted. He asked the Sultan why should I ever be thrown down? The Sultan answered to draw the others a lesson. The Judge replied but I am not the only who has committed this kind of crimes, then, why you do not throw some other people to draw me a lesson. Afterward the Sultan came into laugh and forgave him. Moreover, this irrational character of judgment is exemplified in its best in the story of Sultān Mahmoud and the thieves in the Mathnavī of Rumī (vol. VI, part 89) in which the Sultān was strolling alone and came across a band of thieves and said “ I am one of you.”.They started telling in what talent each of them is possessed. “ What is your talent?” asked him one of the thieves and the Sultān replied:” My talent lies in my beard. Thanks to my beard, criminals are freed from punishment.” At the last scene of the story in which all of the thieves are arrested the one who recognized their companion as the King sat on the throne said that “The life of us all is now hanged on a slight wigwag of your beard” an allegory for the Sultān’s absolute power and meanwhile the irrational nature of his judgment. ↑
5. This poem is written by Sawāreh ʾIli-khānizādeh , a poem that its manifest-like form is mostly compared with the poem of Fesāne of Nimā Youshij the father of Persian modern poetry. ↑
6. ‘A dream to come true’ is an expression that usually used for the fulfillment of a wish but it is used here as an expression for those visions that seen in a dream and afterward they become realized that is, seen to be happen in day-time. In the theoretical explanations and also in the film #2, it is explained and also seen that how a ‘good dream’ is assigned to those dreams that are able to realize themselves in the day-time notwithstanding of its content and its ‘pleasure-value’. This ‘happening’ itself is the fulfillment of an implicit wish for being connected to the realm of occult (gheyb) in which every happening in this world is decreed. Then when a dream ‘happens’ it simply signifies that its dreamer is in a direct connection with the realm of truth (ʿālam-I ḥaghighat). This justifies the usage of the word rāst which literally means ‘true’. ↑
7. It is known from Claude E. Schannon the initiator of information theory in mathematics and telecommunication engineering that information is the negative reciprocal value of probability. This simple quote needs a lot of mathematical derivations (for example see Schannon : 390 f.) but for instance when someone says in a sunny day that there would be a storm in just half an hour, perhaps nobody believes it because it contains too much information. This amount of information should be heard or believed just from a well-informed personality.

   ↑

8. The ‘daughter of Karjou’: Moloud Khān #2; part2; Scene3; Min: 03:45”- 06:00”); in: Film: Moloud Khān (The Panegyrist) Filmed and Directed by Iradj Esmailpour Ghucahnai; Filmed in spring of 2007 (1386 SH)

   URLs:

   Moloud Khān #1; part1; URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQNqmjxL05s

   Moloud Khān #1; part2; URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFuYQ4nRAj8

   Moloud Khān #2; part1; URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XS-0KJoDc4

   Moloud Khān #2; part2; URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4PZE9u0on8

   Moloud Khān #2; part3; URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPBmoi15b-E ↑

9. Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, Band 1, Albert J. et al, Sage publication, 2010, p. 969, under ‘Webs of Significance’. ↑
10. These narrative forms go in parallel with the written literature of religious books that the origin of just one of them that is miʿrāj-nāme could be genealogically traced. ↑
11. Just like a oral narrative that after a long usage changes its original meaning, this famous quote from Geertz has also ironically lost its ‘tendentious commentaries’ in the term of a long use through other anthropologists to be able to be read in its final abstract and perhaps more meaningful form. The Original text was this: “Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript- foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.” (Geertz, 1973: 10) ↑
12. In other words it is interpretable just like a genuine dream. What is said in the form of a faked dream has the same phenomenological effects of the authentic one and similarly reflects a decreed fact that would be ‘eventized’ as fate in the future: “Der Traum folgt dem Mund”. ↑
13. ‘ Flesh’ and ‘word’ and their interrelation are two terms usedin this book as theoretical tools for a better description of the complex relation between signified and signifier in a Muslim Persianate context and language fully described in the theoretical part. For instance, with ‘flesh’ is hinted here mostly to materialistic aspect of the unconsciousness like what the literary critic Barbara Johnston has addressed it as a transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity and discussed all over in his book (see Johnson 2008). Johnson emphasised on the Lacan’s interest in materiality (rather than meaning) by quoting from Lacan: “If you open a book of Freud, and particularly those books which are properly about the unconscious, you can be absolutely sure- it is not a probability but a certitude- to fall on a page where it is not only a question of words- naturally in a book there are many words, many printed words- but words which are the object through which one seeks for a way to handle the unconscious. Not even the meaning of the words, but words in their flesh, in their material aspect.”(Lacan 1970, 187 via Johnson) Hence Unconscious and language are both some structures built of signifiers which in turn are “indeed a special sort of matter, an incarnate form of material being” (SXIV 5/10/67). As a matter of simplicity I have used the word ‘flesh’ to designate this ‘special sort of matter’. ↑
14. To read more about ʿālam-i ʾamr and ʿālam-i khalgh see:

    Joudi, Seyid Zabih-ollah: “ʿālam-i ʾamr wa ʿālam-i khalgh dar ghorān-i Karim”; in the Journal of Golistān-i Ghorān, No. 113, 2002 (1381), pp:40-41.

    Jafari, Jaghoub: “ Maʿāref-i Ghorāni: ʿālam-I khalgh wa ʾamr”; in: Darshāy-i az maktab-i Islam, No. 595, Autumn 2010 (1389), pp:17-22.

    Beheshti, Mohammad: “ Taʿamoli bar ʿĀlam-i Khalgh wa ʿĀlam-i ʾAmr”; in the Journal of Golistān-i Ghorān, No. 88, Autumn 2001 (1380), pp: 17-21.

    Also in:

    Hoseyni Beheshti, Seyid Mohammad: “Ālam-i Khalgh wa ʿĀlam-i ʾAmr”; In the Journal of Maktab-i Tashayoʿ, No. 9, Spring 1962 (1341), pp: 242-261. ↑

15. Here Rumi alludes to one of the miracle of Moses whose staff turned into a snake when he throw it down on the floor. It is hinted to this miracle in many verses in Quran including this one: “And [he was told], “Throw down your staff.” But when he saw it writhing as if it was a snake, he turned in flight and did not return. [ Allah said], “O Moses, approach and fear not. Indeed, you are of the secure.” (28:31) ↑
16. Perhaps this philosophical background and knowledge is the reason behind the great sympathy that the Iranian intellectuals found with the famous quote of Heidegger that states “Language is the house of being” [Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins] in his “letter to humanism “ (1949). ↑
17. As it is the main discussion of this article, this is valid not valid for the kings and the sheikhs as it is believed that they are free from personal needs and temptations. The king is the shadow of the God (ẓil ol-lāh) and a sheikh is also supposed to be annihilated in God (fanā fi-lāh). A poet is also celebrated because of its power on the words. ↑
18. Almost all the Sufis are in a consensus that killing of the nafs (koshtan-i nafs) is impossible. Instead they try to degrade and enervate or as it is used to say to break it (shekastan-i nafs) or to tame it (rām kardan-i nafs). A visual representation of this taming is findable in the painted picture of Sheikh ʿAbdol-Ghāder-i Gilāni the founder of Ghāderie brotherhood in the last chapter and before the Epilouge, in which a lion is kneeled in front of his feet (Esmaeilpour, 223). The lion symbolizes his nafs that -regardless of its enormous power- is fully under his control.

    Rumi, instead, used the metaphor of a snake or a dragon for the ego or nafs. In the third book of Mathnavi he narrates the story of a “snake catcher” (metaphor for an unripe Sufi) who brought a dormant dragon (nafs)out from a cold mountain to the warm Baghdad. The sun of Baghdad activates the dragon and devours the snake-catcher. Rumi concludes: Nafs / Az ghame bi ālati afsorde ast…which reads: Nafs is a dragon asleep, but not dead,/ With the right weapon will leave the bed/…/The dragon remain dormant in the cold;/Keep him off the sun and the warm wind./If he is sleeping or down, he is tame;/As he wakes up, you are his game./…/As the hot sun brings out the lust,/The inner bat will venture out./Venture a holy war (Jihad) and kill him fast/ You will see your freedom at last. (Rumi , Mathnavi, book III, verses 1053 ff. via Aghevli: 78)

    ↑

19. It is not accidental that Rumi uses the word sokhan (speech) here in this verse as the ‘voice’ of love (= God in Sufis utterance) that is to be reflected in a mirror which is, above all, an optical device. This and many other materials that are partly discussed in this essay, support the general primacy of ‘voice’ on ‘image’ -and accordingly the ‘word’ on ‘flesh’- in the Islamic philosophy and particularly in the Sufis system of thought. ↑
20. Despot or Jabār is one of the names of Allah (ʾasmāʾ ol-lah) in Islamic philosophy and mindset for example Allah is attributed as despot or jabār in the verse 59:23 of Quran. The word Sultān is also used in many places in Quran as authority which mostly reflected back to God. Then this compare is not extraneous from the issue. ↑
21. There is a very good example of the citational scriptural nature of dreams from the time of Abbasids which is taken by Anna Marie Schimmel also as an example of the art of positive interpretation of the Muslim interpreters (Schimmel: 59). The Caliph al-Mahdi saw his face turned black in his dream and this made him so upset as it is commonly believed that the black color alludes the face of the sinners and accursed peoples in the day of final judgment (youm ol–ghiyāmah) But Kermāni turned this bad omen into a good one by relating it to the verse 16:58 of Quran:

    “And when one of them is informed of [the birth of] a female, his face becomes dark, and he suppresses grief.”

    Then, the true interpretation was that the caliph will happily find a new daughter. ↑

22. Then one can allegorically say that a moʿabir is analogous to a midwife who prevents the developmental problems of a breech birth (in which the baby enters the pelvis with the buttocks or feet first, as opposed to the normal head-first presentation) by turning the position of the fetus baby before its birth. ↑
23. For example Barbara Langner in her book has used the same kind of categorization for the dreams of agyptians in Mamlukian resources (that is: persönlische Botschaften, persönlische Weissagungen, eine politische Botschaft, politische Weissagungen, Geheimnisvolle Stimmen) (Langner: 66-89) ↑
24. The language of this kind of dreams that lack a high amount of subjective dimension and follow the synopsis of popular religious dream narratives is ‘empty’. (See also the notions on Taʿārof and the influence of Iranian bureaucratic literature and the impress of the state power on language in the first part). In a society in which personal identity and individuality is not celebrated narrating an overstated dream is not normative and would be considered as a sign of ambitious intensions. Although every dream-story itself is an ego-document but this uncelebrated ego should be camouflaged in the empty language of ever-known forms of narrativity. ↑
25. This is a name that Clifford Geertz has given to his method in his book “The Interpretation of Cultures” (1973) for ethnography by which, the understanding of a human behavior is not apart from its context and this calls for many kinds of descriptions including ‘literary criticism’ or ‘new historicism’ that is also tried to be done here. In the first part of this book it was explained that how this attempt confronts despair as most of the dreams narrated by the interviewees, irrespective of the social or personal function, obey the same syntax and grammar of utterance. The good news was that this homogeneous material, makes statistical efforts and analysis effortless but on the other hand it makes the ethnographical effort on them of an effort at “thick description”. ↑
26. Narrated Abu Huraira: I heard the Prophet saying, “Whoever sees me in a dream will see me in his wakefulness, and Satan cannot imitate me in shape.” Abu ‘Abdullah said, “Ibn-i Sirin said, ‘Only if he sees the Prophet in his (real) shape.'” (Bukhari /Volume 9, Book 87/Hadith no. 122) ↑
27. The only difference between this ‘objective collective unconsciousness’ discussed here with the Jungian mere ‘collective unconsciousness’ is that the archaic aspect of this unconsciousness is not remained restricted to the archetypes (universal storehouse of psychic contents) but also traceable in the archaic words of the language. ↑
28. Here initiates an interesting conflict between what everyone wants to experience and what the doctrine of a despotic king –colored with religious dogmas- says one should experience. The language as the common medium of communication starts to be loaded under the steady pressure of this conflict. This ‘loading of language’ refers to a literalization of language, a process that according to Lifton makes a God out of the words and images but this loading is a two-sided process. From the other side, the poetry comes to fixate a Prometheus rebel inside the words .Analogous to what a poet like Hafiz has done with the Iranian structure of mind and unconsciousness through popularization of the words used among the Sufis as a fellowship of utterance and meanwhile through an ultimate fixation of the meaning of these words in their most opposite meanings that they had among the popular that is generating new primal words. ↑
29. For example its defensive function to hide and protect the True Self or at its healthiest to search for conditions which will make it possible for the True Self to come into its own and so on… (See Winnicott: 142-143) ↑
30. This common phenomenal ground for the ambiguity of these different genres of speeches is comparable to what Heidegger discussed in §35 under “the Idle talk” “Das Gerede”. The effect of idle chatter is to close us off within the conventional (cf. Kaelin: 111). ↑
31. The long-term effect of a despotic state have bred a language with high potential for hiding the true intention of its speaker through wrapping it in the hermeneutics and the potential of words for metonymical interpretation. For instance, it is still a open question that if Hafiz ever drinks alcohol or he meant something spiritual by using the words like wine. Rumi also writes:خاموش و نام باده مگو پیش مرد خام//چون خاطرش به باده ی بد نام می رود. Behold and do not mention the name of Wine in front of an unaccustomed man/Because his mind will associate it with the ignominious wine. This potential for metonymy is absolute that is, it stands not to this ability of seeing “this as that” but rather the ability of interpreting this as its opposite. All these is discussed once in the first part by the use of Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit and the related theories on language and plays. In the so-called part it was explained that this feature of Persianate languages is because of the particular and absolute relation between signified and signifier (lack of slippage or paradigmatic degree of freedom) so that the chain of signifier is fixed and localized above the level of signified. This direct indexical relation between a symbol and its meaning is perhaps what R. Edgar has found ‘authoritative’ in Islamic dream theories (Edgar: 117-118). This authority is rooted in Shariah (Law and Religion) as the ‘words of the power ‘. Then, the only possible degree of freedom to talk subversive lies in the in-built capacity of the words themselves that is in the metonymical ‘power of the words’ for being taken as their opposite. ↑
32. This epigraph is a verse that is usually used in Iranian high schools to teach the students about sanʿat-i ʾihām or the technique of writing with suggestiveness in Persian poetry. Its again about the Kurdish legend of Shirin and Farhād, two beloved that a synopsis of their story was told in the dissertation. The word Shirin and khāb have both two parallel meanings. The word khāb could stand for both ‘dream’ and ‘sleep’. Shirin is also the name of Farhād’s beloved but meanwhile means sweet. Then it is quite unclear if Farhād has been dropped in a deep sweet sleep because he was tired of digging the mountain (that could be interpreted as his tiredness of love because in the story, to dig a channel in the mountain was the only way toreach his beloved, Shirin) or he is paced in the dream of his beloved (Shirin). Then again two opposite meanings is considerable for this verse, one meaning states for a lover who is finally get tired of doing such a hard duty for his beloved and meanwhile it marks Farhad as a faithful lover who finally meets his beloved in a dream. ↑
33. In 50s Lacan began to re-read Freud’s works in relation to linguistics, ethnology, and topology. “The return to Freud” is the name given to this studies reflected first in his report “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” ↑
34. The effect of the obscene appearance of unconsciousness in the language on the conscience of its speakers is fascinating. The abundance of primal words in Iranian languages contradicts the conscious sense for the use of the words – and contradictive meanings that they may imply- which is to be a kind of conscience. The society is automatically blinded from the inner life of a speaking subject then, the subject can say numerous lies without any blame of conscience because the conscience is already out, objectively dwelling in the language. Whenever we choose the words correctly and carefully, the language will automatically say big lies for us without any danger for guilt or surplus. Having this kind of command on language is known as rendi and in fact it is a very positive attribute and in Iranian literature is exemplified in its best in the character of Hafiz (Hafizi-rind). What that could be interpreted for the people of the other cultures as a lie is considered by the native speakers of Iranian languages as rendi. ↑
35. The aesthetic function of primal words should not be overlooked here. It is under this sense of beauty that the two opposites could ever tame in a word. We have come to this in a full chapter and in our review from Roger Caillois’s stances on camouflage in his seminal article “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (part4, chapter 4). He argues that “assimilation to space” is necessarily accompanied by a decline in the feeling of personality and life but meanwhile is accompanied with a strange sense of beauty and aesthetics. Through this ‘instinct’, life takes a step backwards as the insect turns into leafs(planet) or crabs into stones to gain something more than revival because –regardless how skillfully is their camouflaging tricks- they are still likely to be eaten by their foes. ↑
36. The philosophical frame in which the name or ʾism is related with a thing and the way that it should be interpreted to become in an authentic relation with the realm of occult (gheyb) or the ‘other side’ is described by Rumi in the first volume of Mathnavi : (here is an AI generated translation in English. Another translation could be brought here (to be find in Mojaddadi: 78-80)): The progenitor of mankind, who broadened the knowledge of names \ His knowledge fills countless veins, each one \ The name of each thing is just as that thing is \ Until the end of its essence, he extends his hand \ Whatever title was given does not change \ The one who gives it as such is never lazy \ Whoever is a believer first sees as such \ And whoever is a disbeliever appears last \ As for the name of each thing, you hear it from the one who knows \ Listen to the secret of the knowledge of names \ The name of each thing reveals itself to us \ The name of each thing holds its secret with the Creator \ To Moses, the name of the stick was a rod \ But with the Creator, its name was a serpent \ The name of the idolater was given \ Yet in the realm of existence, he was a believer \ That which near us is called “I” \ Before the Truth, this name is a mask for “me” \ A form existed in me within non-existence \ Before the Truth, it was neither more nor less \ The essence of this became our true name \ In the presence of the One who is our end \ For the man, a name is given at the end \ Not for that which is borrowed and named \ When Adam’s eye saw with pure light \ His soul and the essence of names became apparent \ When the angels of the divine light fell upon him \ He prostrated and rushed towards service \ This praise of Adam that I mention \ Is insufficient even if counted until Resurrection \ He knew all, and when his fate arrived \ Knowledge became a prohibition, leading him to error \ How strange, that prohibition was for the sake of non-permission \ Or perhaps it was a misinterpretation and delusion \ When interpretation gained preference in his heart \ His nature ran bewildered toward wheat \ When the gardener stepped on a thorn \ The thief found the opportunity and took the goods \ When he recovered from bewilderment and returned to the path \ He saw that the thief had taken his goods from the workshop \ He said, “Our Lord, indeed we have wronged,” and sighed \ Which means darkness approached, and the path was lost \ Then fate was a cloud that covered the sun \ A lion and serpent, reduced to a mouse through it \ If at times I do not see the trap of fate \ I am not the only one, ignorant of its command \ Oh, how fortunate is the one who took up good deeds \ He put aside strength and took the path of humility \ Though fate may cover like darkness of night \ Still, fate ultimately will grasp you \ If fate attempts your life a hundred times \ Fate will also grant you life, and heal you \ Even if fate strikes you a hundred times \ It may strike above the wheel of your station \ From grace, know this, that it terrifies you \ So that it may seat you in the realm of safety \ These words have no end, and it turned late \ Listen to the story of the rabbit and the lion. ↑
37. And [subsequently] the king said, “Indeed, I have seen [in a dream] seven fat cows being eaten by seven [that were] lean, and seven green spikes [of grain] and others [that were] dry. O eminent ones, explain to me my vision, if you should interpret visions.”They said, “[It is but] a mixture of false dreams, and we are not learned in the interpretation of dreams.”But the one who was freed and remembered after a time said, “I will inform you of its interpretation, so send me forth.” [He said], “Joseph, O man of truth, explain to us about seven fat cows eaten by seven [that were] lean, and seven green spikes [of grain] and others [that were] dry – that I may return to the people; perhaps they will know [about you].”(12: 43-46) ↑
38. Most of the Sonnis in Kurdistan are followers of the traditions of Ashāʿere and Shāfeʿī. The inflictive point in the life of Sheikh Ashʿarī the initiator of the Ashāʿere in which he turned his face from ʾIʿtezāliyoun toward his self-developed tradition of Sonnah is attributed to a dream of Mohammad that is supposed to be seen by him . (See: Wafiyāt ol-Aʿyān, vol. 93, p:282 & vol. 3, p: 285; Albedāyah wa al-Nahāyah, vol. 11, P: 187; Al-Fihrist, Ibn-i Nad;m, p: 271 via Sobhani Tabrizi: 18-19) And accordingly the life of Imām Shāfeʿī (Abu ʾAbdullah Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi‘i) is changed through a dream of the prophet and Ali or better to say by the saliva of Ali as the prophet said in his dream to Ali “learn him!” (Shʿfeʿī rā taʿlīm kon) and then Ali spitted his saliva in the mouth of Shʿfeʿī bestowing him the ʿilm and the power of poetry. (ḏikr-i Tārikh-i ʾOliyā, Jafar-ibn-i Mohammad: 122 f. in: Farhang-i Irānzamin magazine, No.6, 1959 (1337), pp: 95-158.) In another version of this story the prophet himself threw the saliva and Ali instead gives him a ring as a symbol of ʿilm or celestial knowledge (Attar, taḏkeratol-Ouliyā: 612 via Heydari: 15). Also the following text is to be checked:

    تذکرة الاولیا؛فرید الدین عطار نیشابوری،تصحیح ر.نیکلسن،چاپ دوم،صفی علیشاه،1374.

    ايرانيان باستان هيچ گاه آب دهان بر زمين يا در آب نمي‌انداختند

    ايرانيان باستان آخشيج را آلوده نميكردند  ↑

39. We remember from the dream of Zaḥāk the demon-like king of Median who saw a true terrible dream. ↑
40. In this story, Jousef is a young man but the term “old wise man” or pir is a term that refers to the archetypical character not the physical characteristic of this figure. This extraneous relation between the worldly age and celestial status is a known fact among the Kurds especially among the ahlli haq sect in Kurdistan who address their arch-sheikh with pir-i bāṭeī or the one who is old in respect to the world of unseen. The life story of Jousef is totally symbolic and full of metaphors so that it is considered in Islamic culture as the best story (aḥsan ol-ghosas). In this story, his envious brothers drop him into a water well, which is a metaphor for ẓolamāt, a dark horrible abyss that in contrast to its un-canniness entails the water of life. Then Jousef in his youth has the status of an ‘old wise man’ who had also authority (welāyat) upon his father Jacob which means that in the occult scales of truth, he was older than his father. ↑
41. There is seemingly a big rivalry between revelation and poetry but this rivalry has made these two issues close to each other. There is a Surrah in Quran which is named ash-Shoʿarā or ‘the poets’. In this Surrah we read: “Shall I inform you upon whom the devils descend? They descend upon every sinful liar. They pass on what is heard, and most of them are liars. And the poets – [only] the deviators follow them; Do you not see that in every valley they roam. And that they say what they do not do?” (26: 221-226) There are also many verses in which it is tried to differentiate revelation from poetry: “And it is not the word of a poet; little do you believe.” (69: 41)Or: “And We did not give Prophet Muhammad, knowledge of poetry, nor is it befitting for him. It is not but a message and a clear Qur’an” (36:69) According to Shariʿa or orthodox way of Islam, Mohammad was the last prophet or khātam ol-nabi-īn and after his death the door of revelation is forever closed to human. but the Sufis have another interpretation on this: According to their read of Quran, God has make revelation even to the tiny bee to learn how to make honey: “And your Lord inspired اوحی to the bee, “Take for yourself among the mountains, houses, and among the trees and [in] that which they construct.” (16:68) The word اوحی used in this verse comes from وحی which means revelation. Then, in the eyes of a Sufi, when a bee is deserved to become conversant with god how could be the human be deprived from it?

    چونک او حی الرب الی النحل آمدست

    خانهٔ وحیش پر از حلوا شدست

    او به نور وحی حق عزوجل

    کرد عالم را پر از شمع و عسل

    این که کرمناست و بالا می‌رود

    وحیش از زنبور کمتر کی بود

    As for the verse: “And your Lord inspired اوحی “to the bee/The house of the bee’s revelation is full of honey/Because of the almighty god’s revelation /It made the whole world full of wax and honey/This (human being) which is ‘honored’ کرمنا and ascends/How could has less revelations than a bee

    (Rumi, Mathnavi, vol. V, part 51) By the word ‘honored’ Rumi is referring to human being and in fact to this verse of Quran: “And We have certainly honored the children of Adam and carried them on the land and sea and provided for them of the good things and preferred them over much of what We have created, with [definite] preference.” (17:70) ↑

42. To understand the importance of dream in a Muslim milieu, it is helpful to note that in this book (Ḥayāt al-Ḥeyvān ) which is supposed to be a book on biology, one finds many stories on dreams and also after every explanation on each animal comes a description on the meaning of the appearance of this animal in a dream. ↑
43. It is also comparable with the dream of Marʿad-ibn abdol Kalāl in Ḥayāt al-Ḥeyvān, vol. I, 311-313. ↑
44. To see the role of Oracles in the court of Anoushiravan see:

    Christian, S. Arthur: “Iran dar Zaman-i Sāsāniyān”; Translated by Rashid-i Yāsemi, Tehran, Amir KAbir Publishing, 1988 (1367). ↑

45. As it is discussed all through this book, the water is conflated with ʿilm which is not only science but also the know-how of the secrets that rules on the materialistic world from the world of hidden (or the Godly science when attributed with ladoni). Different kind of water in mystical language stands for different kinds of knowledge or ʿilm (a river for the outer knowledge and an ocean of the inner knowledge and so on…). Water in this sense signifies the symbolic capital in the same way that water in the normal life signifies either state power or economical capital (dowlat ). Descriptive examples of this relation between knowledge and water specially in the form of a saliva is to see in many hagiographies. Some of them are referred in this book but the reader can look into this article for more examples: Heydari, Hassan: “Shiwehāyi Nāder az Tabarok wa Shafābakhshi dar Motoun ʿIrfāni”; in:Moṭāliʿāt-i ʿIrfāni magazine, spring and summer of 2009 (1388), No. 9, pp: 5-28. ↑
46. Although the main focus of this book -at least in its descriptional body of interviews and its gathered regional information and materials- is n the dream culture of the Kurds Sufis in Sanandaj but referring to the Rumi’s stories as a poet who wrote in Persian and lived in Turkey is not pointless. Firstly he has a enormous influence on the sufi’s literature regardless of their language, secondly, Persian remained to be the main symbolic language –or even to say argot language- of the Sufis all around in the region and thirdly there are many – supposed to be regional- folk stories in Kurdistan who follow the same synopsis of the Rumi’s stories for example the Kurdish story of Lās wa Khazāl that is supposed to be one of the most important regional stories (Ghazi: 513-514) has many similarities with the story of the ‘Chinese maiden’ in the fifth book of Rumi’s mathnavi (Ayoubiyan, 1964(b): 200 via Ghazi: 514). ↑
47. The original text is here:

    در میان گریه خوابش در رُبود

    دید در خواب او که پیری رو نمود

    گفت ای شه مژده حاجاتت رواست

    گر غریبی آیدت فردا ز ماست

    چونکه آید او حکیمی حاذق است

    صادقش دان که امین و صادق است

    در علاجش سحرِ مطلق را ببین

    در مزاجش قدرت حق را ببین

    چون رسید آن وعده گاه و روز شد

    آفتاب از شرق، اختر سوز شد

    بود اندر منظره شه مُنتظر

    تا ببیند آنچه بنمودند سِرّ

    دید شخصی فاضلی پُر مایه ای

    آفتابی در میان سایه ای

    می رسید از دور مانند هلال

    نیست بود و هست بر شکل خیال

    نیست وَش باشد خیال اندر روان

    تو جهانی بر خیالی بین روان

    (Rumi, Mathnavi, Vol. I, verses 61-70) ↑

48. There are not many examples for this kind of false dreams because a dream should fit the ‘syntax’ to be able to find publicity. Moreover there are some examples in the history that are recognized as an invented dream with political ends. For example the dream that Mohammad Hāshim āṣif has seen for Shāh Sultān Ḥoseyn ṣafavī. (Rostam-ol-tavārikh: 122 via Nozhat: 76-77). Nozhat explains that the manner of speech in this dream story is in contradiction of what was usual in the Safavid era. (Noʿ-i bayān bā ān che ke maʿmoul zamān ṣafaviyān boude moġāyerat dārad) (Nozhat: 77) ↑
49. Mostly because he himself or his fore-fathers were also a normal subject in just few generations before. The reader may remember that although the longest genealogical tree in Iran belongs to the rulers of Kurdistan but still they need to fake up some narratives to wash out their former social class marked in their familial name Ardalān which means a mill-worker. ↑
50. Then it seems that the religious thoughts and believes in Shi’ism also plays a crucial role here but we have to keep in mind that Shi’ism has dealt very selective with the history of early Islam and just those events are magnified that have a similar synopsis with the pre-Islamic mythology or events. In our case ,the legend of Abolfaḍl and Imām Ḥoseyn in Kārbalā is probably an Islamic substitute for the myth of Siyāvash in pre-Islamic mythology (see for example Abadi: 158) ↑
51. The same proverb is to be found in Persian with a little but plausible difference:

    Har kasi dar Khāb binad morgh o māhi / Yā be doulat miresad yā pādeshāhi

    One who sees a bird or a fish in his dream/ Will become wealthy or a king. ↑

52. Ibn Sirin after describing the different forms and combinations of sex with four-legged animals (chahār pāyān) added this note that if the dreamer is used to have sex with the animals in the daytime then the dream has no interpretation. ↑
53. This is also perhaps because of the blending happened between two persons : Mohammad Ibn-i Sirin (liverd between 33-110 in Arabic calander) and another interpreter Aḥmad Ibn-i Sirin who lived in the time of Maʾmoun the caliph. Karl Brackertz, the translator of the Roman version of Ibn-I Sirinn’ book of dreams has written several passages to clear this ambiguity but as he declares the task remains anyway foggy (Brackertz: 10 ff.). ↑
54. Terms used by Karl Wittfogel in his book: “Oriental despotism; a comparative study of total power”; New York, Random House, 1957. ↑
55. Although this does not diminishes the wiliness and potential of ordinary people for ‘risking’ to see an extra-ordinary go-getting dream. (An example of this kind of dream is accounted in Toḥfeyi Nāṣeri of Shokrollah-i Sanandaji in which a group of Kurds went to Tehran in the era of Qajars (Nāṣer ol-Din Shāh?) and took refuge in Dar-ol-ḥokoume of Tehran for the release of their leader from the prison. The government replies that they should return back to Kurditan but they insist because the head of this rebellion had seen his victory in a dream and so on..(the synopsis of this story should be brought here from the book). ↑
56. We can summarize these differences in this that a real king is the one who has a world and a subject is the one who lives in the given world of the others with all its banalities and normal occurrences. All these can be described by the philosophical instances given in the third part of Martin Heideggers “Time and Being” (§ 14-24) on the differences between “in –der-Welt-sein” and “haben von Welt” and accordingly the difference between “umweltlichkeit” and “Weltlichkeit”. ↑
57. There is a very good example of the citational scriptural nature of dreams from the time of Abbasids which is taken by Schimmel also as an example of the art of positive interpretation of the Muslim interpreters (Schimmel: 59). The Caliph al-Mahdi saw his face turned black in his dream and this made him so upset as it is commonly believed that the black color alludes the face of the sinners and accursed peoples on the day of final judgment (youm ol-ghiyāmah). But Kermāni turned this bad omen into a good one by relating it to the verse 16:58 of Quran: “And when one of them is informed of [the birth of] a female, his face becomes dark, and he suppresses grief.” This verse is a very strange reference to a good omen. It means having a daughter is a reason for grief but the point of reference of this verse is an pre-Islamic belief. Then the dream would be a reason of grief just for a jāhel (ignorant) -a general name for the pre-Islamic people- and of course not for Al- Mahdi who was the caliph of Muslims. the true interpretation was that the caliph will happily find a new daughter. ↑