Several centuries later, the popular and last great book of dream inter-
pretation, written by the Ottoman Hanafijurist‘Abdalghani al-Nablusi
(1641–1713), a shaykh in the Qadiriyya and Naqshibandi Sufiorders,
reflects a similar mechanistic description of the structure of dreams.
Man sees dreams with the spirit and understands them with the intelligence...
When a man sleeps, his spirit spreads like the light of a lamp or the sun. By this light
and the brightness of God he sees that which the angel of dreams shows him...
When the senses are reawakened to their activities, the spirit is reminded of what
the angel of dreams has shown and suggested to it.^53
Functioning like a photograph of the other world encountered in sleep, and
like that other equipotent ambassador from the unseen world, the Quran,
the dream imprints itself not rationally, but suprasensorally. The absolute,
unplanned presence that this surreal image offers guarantees an authenti-
city far more stable than any mere material image, mediated by human
agency, could offer.7.3 Exile and the Seven Sleepers
Dreams indicated displacement not only across the realms of the material
and the spiritual, but our mundane, waking experiences of displacement.
In his commentary on the dream cited above, Baidawi points this out in his
grammatical comparison between the dream and the highly resonant
forms ofgh-r-bain Arabic.Gh-r-barefers to the West (gharb) as the
space of the setting sun, as opposed to the East (shark), the land of the
rising sun. Identified with mystical illumination in Suhrawardi’s Eastern/
Enlightenment (ishraqi) philosophy, the notion of the orient comes to
signify proximity to the divine. In contrast,ghurbaindicates notions of
estrangement, exile, or homesickness, particularly in Suhrawardi’s treatise
Tale of the Occidental Exile(Qissas al-Ghurba al-Gharbiyya), where the
West is represented as the world of matter and darkness in which we are
trapped.^54 In hisMeccan Revelations, ibn Arabi complicates the concept by
asserting that the true home of humankind is with God in paradise, and
thus our experience in this world is one of permanent alienation (ghurba)
in which all places are also equally home.^55 This sense of alienation is
conveyed in the connotations ofgharib, meaning strange, but also applying
to somebody excluded and deserving sympathy. It also functions as a(^53) von Grunebaum and Caillois, 1966 :9. (^54) Moris, 2003 : 47. (^55) El-Khachab, 2010.
198 The Transcendent Image