Iain R. Edgar

The Dream Will Tell: Militant Muslim Dreaming in the Context of Traditional and Contemporary Islamic Dream Theory and Practice

Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership and membership appear to have been motivated, inspired, and guided by certain dreams. Their understanding of dreams seems to draw at least partly on traditional and contemporary Islamic dream theories. If this hypothesis is correct, then there is a need for the urgent study of Islamic Jihadist political/religious conversion and guidance dreams across the Middle East. The dream—as experienced, reported, and interpreted—is now a significant aspect of the global conflict between Al-Qaeda and its associates versus the core value system of Western civilization.

Istikhara: The Guidance and Practice of Islamic Dream Incubation Through Ethnographic Comparison

This paper introduces and contextualizes Istikhara, Islamic dream incubation practice, as a way to approach the dynamics of Muslims’ inner and outer worlds as an interrelated process of embodied well‐being. We introduce an anthropologically informed debate on healing dreaming in Islam and Islamic healing dreaming practices. Based on our research, we discuss ethnographic examples of Istikhara as practised by British Pakistanis, Pakistanis and last but not least a case study from a corner of the Muslim world, Muslim Bosnia. We explore a shared propensity to dream, though a culturally informed one, and situate the practice into a general economy of Muslim well‐being.

Invisible Elites? Authority and the Dream

This paper seeks to develop a perspective on the dynamic interplay between dreaming, culture and identity. A spectrum of examples show that dream imagery has had and still has today tremendous cultural significance across a whole array of historical, religious and contemporary political and personal contexts. The visionary dream is shown to have underpinned the charter myths of both Israel and Serbia/Kosovo as well as having been the generative source of a core body of hierarchically organised spiritual knowledge in Islamic societies, possibly including the Taliban. Annunciation and calling dreams are commonplace in shamanic and some other societies and individuals can have dreams that prefigure aspects of their developing personal myths. The power and politics of dreaming is further exemplified in the authors example from his dreamwork group that suggest we can dream within the cultural and oppressive stereotypes of our gendered and racist time. Our experience of reality is presented as being dynamically co-created out of both the normative events of everyday life as well as from the human experience of the dream in its powerful and politically evocative forms.

Imprints of Dreaming

In the main scientific discourse, dreaming is considered to be an activity taking place within individual minds. For this reason, dreaming is sharply contrasted with the waking condition, where individual minds and bodies are presumed to interact with each other and with shared environments. Current anthropological theories of dreaming often arise from this assumed distinction: For example, several anthropologists have recognised the significance of studying dreams for grasping possible discrepancies between actual experiences of self and cultural concepts of self in certain societies. This volume develops a novel anthropological approach to dreams by starting from the relationship between dreaming and waking life. We suggest that dreams are receptive to epistemologies embodied in persons, such as local dream theories, and to experiences derived from everyday situations and networks in which dreams occur. For this reason, many dreams are “event‐oriented” and the various papers in this volume demonstrate how dreams may help people to adjust to changing conditions, establish themselves as members of a society, to make sense of their experiences, actions and social relationships, as well as to achieve personal and political goals.