Partisan dreams and prophetic visions: Shi'i critique in al-Masudi's history of the Abbasids.

• Author: Moin, A. Azfar

Abu al-Husayn Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Masudi (d. 956), whom Ibn Khaldun called the Imam of the historians, is a well-studied figure. (1) These studies suggest that a close analysis of al-Masudi's work reveals, at times, a Shi'i bias. The historian's skill at concealing his views can be credited, in some measure, by explaining how such claims rest on circuitous interpretations of his texts. (2) Al-Masudi's critical historiography is difficult to appreciate, moreover, because of our ignorance of the literary code he used. This paper takes a step towards deciphering this code, and presents new and direct evidence of al-Masudi's partisan critique of the Abbasids--a dynasty notorious for its betrayal of Ali's family, in whose name it had made a successful bid for power.

In terms of methodology I propose, quite simply, that we pay closer attention to the reports containing dreams in al-Masudi's history of the Abbasids. While modern studies of al-Masudi's work enhance our understanding of his critical standpoint, they generally ignore dreams in their analyses. (3) This represents a hermeneutical lapse in our approach to early Islamic historiography: that is, a general tendency to prefer fact over "fiction" and material over "immaterial" reality. In contrast, I argue that the dream belongs to the lost "intellectual scaffoldings" with the help of which early Muslim historians constructed narrative. (4) Knowledge of this literary device is not lost to us; enough clues exist for a feasible attempt at its reconstruction. Accordingly, the first half of this study makes a case for a literary-critical approach for interpreting oneiric anecdotes in early Islamic historiography. The second half will apply this methodology to al-Mas udi's treatment of the Abbasids.

THE DREAM AS A LITERARY DEVICE

Today it is well accepted that the historians and chroniclers of al-Mas udi's time were more than mere compilers of available reports (khabar, pl. akhbar), and that they had something of their own to say. (5) There is little agreement, however, as to a useful methodology for extracting and analyzing these authors' implicit commentary from either the "facts" or the "style" of their historical reports. The most suggestive, and indeed pioneering, work to appear in this regard recently is Tayeb El-Hibri's Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography (1999). El-Hibri attempts a literary-critical analysis of major works of early Arabic historiography regarding the Abbasids in order to distill moral and political critique from these texts.

El-Hibri's work is based on a broad and deep reading of the early Arab historical tradition, and is ground-breaking in more respects than one. Nevertheless, his focus is more on executing a free-form literary analysis than on expounding a reusable theoretical framework. He freely admits as much, observing that many of the literary devices of the period are lost to us. His attempts at their recovery, even though illuminating, remain unstructured. More importantly, he is interested in showing how historians of the period produced a shared moral narrative of the Abbasids, designed to resonate with the (assumed) dominant cultural outlook and religious norms of their readership--what is today recognized as the Sunni majority. Such an approach, while it encourages a search for general themes and common patterns across different texts, tends to neglect the specific and oppositional politics embedded in them. The historiography of the period, according to El-Hibri's framework, appears as a subtle but uniformly conservative art combining aesthetic creativity with cautious moral critique. In this view, al-Mas udi's text yields a thesis that meshes well with, for example, that of al-Tabari (d. 923), his older contemporary. Such an image is not altogether incorrect, but it is incomplete. This lacuna, as I argue below, is the reason why, despite a detailed treatment of some of al-Mas udi's dream anecdotes about the Abbasids, El-Hibri overlooks what is plausibly this historian's most important pattern of critique regarding this dynasty.

In order to develop a more structured framework for understanding the function of the dream in Islam's early historiographical tradition, it is worth examining scholarly work on this topos in other Islamic literary spheres. There are useful studies of dreams in the Quran, in hadith traditions, as well as in genres of Islamic writings variously categorized as biographies, ethical treatises and works of literature (adab). (6) The research methodology applied in these studies is varied and includes psychological, anthropological, religious, literary, and historical approaches. A complete review of this scholarship is beyond the scope of this paper. For our purposes, however, it is worth mentioning the semiotic method espoused by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, who suggests conceptualizing medieval Arabic texts as systems of signs in which many semiotic codes co-exist together. (7) Such a system implies a historically structured hierarchy of meaning both among different codes and among signs within a code. Simply put, some signs become culturally more privileged than others over time. In applying this approach to the study of the early Arabic biographical tradition, Malti-Douglas acknowledges the privileged position and "great semiotic potential" of dreams in Islamic literary traditions. (8)

Admittedly, this theoretical perspective is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding early Islamic historiography. It does, nonetheless, allow us to raise concrete questions regarding the structure and function of dreams as signs in a text. For example: how did the dream achieve a privileged position in the Islamic context? What specific cultural and literary functions did the dream come to serve? Did there develop a hierarchy of meaning within the semiotic code consisting of dreams in a text? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to sketch out the genealogy of the "Islamic dream" (so to speak); for it is important to understand why, and in what manner, early Muslim historians like al-Masudi shared with their readership a deep-seated faith in a higher reality accessible via dreams.

Popular conceptions about dreams in pre-Islamic Arabic formed an important basis for Islamic oneirology. The most significant aspect of this pre-Islamic legacy was how it conceived of prophecy, poetry and oneiromancy as phenomena related by the use of rhymed prose (saj'). We are told that the pre-Islamic Arabian soothsayer (kahin, pi. kuhhan), who was also a diviner of dreams and omens, spoke only in saj'. Moreover, poets were commonly thought to receive their inspiration from otherworldly sources, often from demons or spirits. (9) It is for this reason that when the Prophet Muhammad brought rhymed verses of the Quran to his tribe of Quraysh, they rejected his revelation as the "confused dreams" (adghath ahlam) of a poet. (10)

Later in Muhammad's life, when he had become the established leader of a growing Muslim community, rhymed verse was employed against him, but this time in an imitation of the Prophet. A1-Tabari relates an incident from the Prophet's last years, in which Musaylima, who had apostatized and "posed as a prophet, and played the liar," sought to attain the same stature as Muhammad by fabricating rhymed verse that mimicked the Quran. (11) Historians have used such incidents to explain why Muhammad forbade the soothsayers once he came to power. Nonetheless, the pre-Islamic notion that discourses of divination, poetry and prophecy were linked through rhyme was absorbed into Islam. (12) The survival of this nexus is noteworthy, for it enabled the dream and the poem to serve as literary devices whose very form could at times signify prophecy, foreknowledge, or a higher moral authority originating from another world.

In short, dreams were already part of Islamic religious and cultural discourses before the Muslim discovery of Greek knowledge. (13) Nonetheless, Greek influence on Islamic intellectual traditions was significant, not just for the flowering of philosophy, science, and medicine in general, but also for the development of oneirocriticism. (14) The Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun (d. 833) is famous for bringing about this early Islamic renaissance with his large-scale patronage of scholars who translated Greek works into Arabic. It is less well known, however, that al-Ma'mun's intellectual interests were justified in spiritual terms--we are told that a "dream conversation with Aristotle was one of the reasons that induced the caliph al-Ma'mun to promote translations into Arabic of Greek philosophical texts."(15) And so, it was during his reign that Artemidorus' influential work on dreams, Oneirocritica, was translated into Arabic. (16)

Dreaming could open up a world--at least for the learned followers of Plato, Galen, and Artemidorus--that was in a sense more real than the ordinary material reality experienced in the waking state. It has indeed been argued in the context of Greek late antiquity that while modern dichotomies such as dream/reality "may be epistemologically useful, they are ontologically suspect." (17) In order to make a similar case for the Islamic milieu, it is worth examining samples of popular as well as intellectual discourses on dreams.

How did early Muslim society grant dreams the power of legitimation in Islamic discourses'? In order to quantify the level of popular interest in a particular topic in early Islamic society, it is constructive to examine the formal hadith literature on it. As Richard Bulliet has argued, bodies of hadith tradition grew out of the questions that the masses of newly converted Muslims had about their religion. (18) The canonical hadith traditions, according to this view, are more than just the extant repositories of the Prophet's sayings; these texts represent the "sedimentation in social time" (19) of answers to questions that were important for...