Ibn Sirin and ta'bir: the Arabic science of dream interpretation

Ta'bir: this is what the Islamic world called dream interpretation, which there became a true discipline. The term evokes the idea of «crossing over», of passing from the image to its meaning. For centuries Muslim scholars composed vast handbooks, some of which gather thousands of entries. At the centre of this tradition stands a semi-legendary figure whose name is still synonymous with dream interpreter across much of the Arab, Turkish and Persian world: Muhammad ibn Sirin.

A scholar of Basra

Ibn Sirin lived in Basra, in present-day Iraq, and died in 728, in the year 110 of the hijra according to the Islamic calendar. He belonged to the generation of the «successors», those who had known the Companions of the Prophet, and was esteemed as a transmitter of hadith, a jurist and a man of great piety. The sources also mention his work as a cloth merchant.

His reputation as an interpreter of dreams is old and documented by many anecdotes in which he gives short, sharp explanations of the dreams people told him. However, the books that circulate under his name, such as the famous great commentary on dreams, are regarded by scholars as later compilations attributed to him to lend them authority. It is not certain that he wrote any treatise.

Artemidorus in Arabic It was published by the orientalist Toufic Fahd in 1964.

A key step came in the ninth century, when in Baghdad, in the golden age of translation from Greek, Hunayn ibn Ishaq translated the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus into Arabic. The translator adapted the text to the new culture, sometimes replacing references to the Greek gods with monotheistic expressions. A manuscript of this version was rediscovered and published in the twentieth century.

Thanks to this translation many of Artemidorus' principles, such as attention to the dreamer's condition and the use of verbal analogies, entered the Arabic tradition, blending with references to the Qur'an and the hadith. From there some material later passed to Byzantium, in the treatise attributed to Achmet, and finally to the Latin West. The result was an original synthesis, no longer only Greek nor only Arabic.

The great handbooks

Among the most important works is the treatise of al-Dinawari, composed at the beginning of the eleventh century and dedicated to the Abbasid caliph al-Qadir. The author gathers and systematically orders the interpretations of his predecessors, dividing dreams into categories: God and the angels, the prophets, the body, animals, plants, natural phenomena, trades.

Much later, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Damascene mystic and scholar Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi compiled a large alphabetical dictionary of dreams, which achieved enormous circulation and is still reprinted today. In these handbooks, as already in Artemidorus, the meaning of an image changes according to the person: the same dream is read differently for a ruler, a merchant or a poor man.

The tradition of ta'bir shows how dream interpretation was able to cross languages and religions, passing from pagan Greece to Abbasid Baghdad and then to Constantinople and Europe, and how each culture transformed a shared inheritance according to its own values and questions. The name of Ibn Sirin, still printed today on countless popular editions, is the clearest sign of this long continuity.