by Sujit Das
Behold! We told thee that thy Lord doth encompass mankind round about: We granted the vision which We showed thee, but as a trial for men … We put terror (and warning) into them, but it only increases their inordinate transgression! (Q: 17.60).
This verse is too silly. Muhammad claimed to have visited a temple which was destroyed long before him and claimed to have seen angels, gibberish creatures at heaven but could not produce any proof, but Allah wanted the Muslims to believe him without question because it was a test to them. Helpless Muhammad took Allah as witness.
He said: My Lord knows what is spoken in the heaven and the earth, and He is the Hearing, the Knowing. (Q: 21.4).
But the Arabs ridiculed him saying that his night journey was either a dream, or a fabricated story.
Nay, say they, (these are but) muddled dreams; nay, he hath but invented it … (Q: 21.5)
Similar to his vision in the cave, the al-Mi’raj had an extraordinary parallel with another account The Secrets of Enoch, which, composed by an unknown Jewish sectarian group, predates Muhammad by four centuries. Enoch, a three hundred and sixty-five years old man, was taken by two angels and made to pass through the seven heavens, one by one. According to Charles (1999, pp. 4-11, 13-24, 37-39), while Enoch was fast asleep, two angels came to him, called him by his name and said, “ Have courage, Enoch, do not fear; The Eternal God sent us to thee. Thou shalt today ascend with us into heaven”. They took him on their wings and bore him up to the first heaven and placed him on the clouds. In various layers of the heaven, Enoch saw two hundred angels who fly with the wings (some of them had six wings) and rule the stars, angels guard the treasure houses, seven bands of very bright and very glorious angels in sixth heaven sweet and loud singing and all songs of praise, etc. There is a possibility that the al-Mi’raj dream-hallucination was a subconscious representation of this ancient story of Enoch which Muhammad might have heard somewhere. However, to put an end to all the arguments regarding Muhammad’s night journey, let us quote from Ibn Ishaq.
Umm, Abu Talib’s daughter, said: “He [Muhammad] slept in my home that night after he prayed the final night prayer. A little before dawn he woke us, saying, ‘O Umm, I went to Jerusalem.’ He got up to go out, and I grabbed hold of his robe and laid bare his belly. I pleaded, ‘O Muhammad, don’t tell the people about this for they will know you are lying and will mock you. ’He said, ‘By Allah, I will tell them.’ I told a Negress [female Negro] slave of mine, ‘Follow him and listen’ (Ishaq: 184)
Therefore, Umm, the daughter of Abu Talib, confirmed that Muhammad’s famous night journey actually happened in his dream which Muhammad mistook as a real experience. It means, the incident was actually a dream-hallucination. Many of the Meccans also believed the same. Qur’an confirms it.
He said: My Lord knows what is spoken in the heaven and the earth, and He is the Hearing, the Knowing. Nay! say they: medleys of dreams; nay! he has forged it; nay! he is a poet; so let him bring to us a sign as the former (prophets) were sent (with) . (Q: 21.4, 5).
Next, I wish to interpret this dream-hallucination.
2.5.1: A Logical Explanation through Dream Interpretation
Dream is a mild hallucination. It transforms the thoughts into sensory images, mostly of a visual sort. Freud calls it “hallucinatory satisfaction” and “hallucinated fulfillment of wish”. Though there are some minor differences between Freud and Jung’s analysis, both agreed that interpreting a dream can be justified entirely from a scientific standpoint. Since the subconscious mind plays an important part in neurosis and dreams are the direct expression of subconscious psychic activity, the practicability of dream-analysis is beyond any question.
A healthy mind can very easily distinguish between dream and reality; but the neurotic patients, who cannot identify dreams and take it as a real experience, need serious medical attention. For them, the dream is a genuine material, not a distorted substitute for something else. A dream does not simply give them expression to a thought but represent the wish-fulfillment as a hallucinatory experience often with a distortion. Muhammad could not differentiate dream from reality, hence calling him a neurotic patient is not an exaggeration at all. Bukhari (8.77.610) wrote,
Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas’ … Allah’s Apostle actually saw with his own eyes the vision of all the things, which were shown to him on the Night Journey to Jerusalem. It was not a dream.
According to Freud, dream has a sense and it can give meaningful clues if it is translated “backwards” and the distortion is undone. If we analyze this dream-hallucination of Muhammad, we can uncover many facts and create a mental map of this seventh century mental patient.
In 1900, Freud published a major work on the interpretation of dreams where he concluded that the study of the dreams is not only the best preparation for the study of the neurosis but dreams are themselves a neurotic system. He used two terms for dream-interpretation, namely, Manifest dream-content (what the dream apparently tells us) and Latent dream-thoughts (the unconscious thoughts that occur to the dreamer), and concluded (Strachey & Gay, 1966, p. 139), “ Dream as a whole is the distorted substitute for something else, something unconscious, and that of the task of interpreting a dream is to discover this unconscious material. ”
Now, with the help of Freud’s theory we can throw a large amount of light on Muhammad’s strange night journey hallucination. His dream-hallucination has both the above distinctive characteristics as described below.
Manifest dream-content : Buraq; Muhammad met Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, along with a company of Prophets, and acted as their imam in prayer; visiting a temple which did not exist; silver and gold in Allah’s paradise; various angels, etc.
Latent dream-thoughts : wish-fulfillment, ambition fulfillment, erotic wishes, anger, self-glorification, frustration.
When Muhammad’s prophetic claim was under serious doubt after the satanic verses incident, he had a strong desire to reinforce it. As Freud (Strachey & Gay, 1966, p. 264) wrote, “ Dream-work consists essentially in the transformation of thoughts into a hallucinatory experience. How this can happen is sufficiently mysterious ”. Muhammad wanted to replace the Ka’ba with a more credible shrine, desperately needed a new Qibla (direction of prayer) and a new object to exploit. He simply dreamed off the satisfaction of his secret needs. Allah had at His power to have taken Muhammad from his bed (or Umm’s bed) straight up to the heavens, but to impress the importance of Jerusalem upon Muslims; Muhammad was first taken to Jerusalem. In doing so, Allah made the al-Aqsa mosque of Jerusalem “a new object to exploit”. Once the religious importance of al-Aqsa mosque was established, Muslims turned their Qibla towards Jerusalem. However, after 16 /17 months, Allah commanded in His wisdom for the Muslims to face Ka’ba again.
The second troubling question is; why suddenly Allah decided to invite Muhammad to His garden in the seventh sky? The reason was that Muhammad desperately needed a miracle. The al-Mi’raj served that purpose. All he wanted was to elevate himself at the cost of God. He had an insatiable craving for praise. His secret desires were projected as a hallucination. Qur’an says,
Glorified be He Who carried His servant by night from the Inviolable Place of Worship to the Far distant place of worship the neighborhood whereof We have blessed, that We might show him of Our tokens! Lo! He, only He, is the Hearer, the Seer . (Q: 17.1)
The first few words of this verse need to be read between the lines. “Glorified be He” – it is absurd to think that God wanted to glorify Himself. Rather, it was Muhammad who was elevating himself in the name of God. If God is glorified by allowing Muhammad to enter paradise, undoubtedly, Muhammad was overvalued. The ego satisfaction comes from comparing ourselves to our opponent and feeling that we are better in some way. Muhammad used Allah for an ego boost. Freud (Strachey & Gay, 1966, p. 175) wrote, “… the dreamer’s own ego appears in every dream and plays the chief part in it.”
Another latent dream thought was ambition. Muhammad wanted to rise above all other Biblic
al Prophets. All of them had routinely made exacting and detailed predictions to demonstrate their divine authority. But Muhammad was not capable of producing a single miracle, and he knew this inadequacy very well. Hence, in his hallucination, he was greeted by all the Prophets; e.g., Adam, Noah, Aaron, Moses, Abraham, David, Solomon and Jesus. By doing so, this ambitious neurotic patient joined the rank of a Prophet without having a single miracle in his account. Then he led all the Prophets in prayer. It proved his superiority over other Prophets; he was glorified amongst all. Of course Muhammad was superior to all Prophets, otherwise why Allah sent Buraq – a special transport system for him? Ishaq shows, what an important person Muhammad was!
When I came up to mount him (Buraq), he shied. Gabriel placed his hand on its mane and said, ‘Are you not ashamed, O Buraq, to behave in this way? By Allah, none more honorable before Allah than Muhammad has ever ridden you before. The animal was so ashamed that he broke out into a sweat, and stood so that I could mount him . (Ishaq: 182).
Now, we will talk about Muhammad’s erotic wishes – another latent dream-thought. Ishaq wrote.
He took me into Paradise, and there I saw a damsel with dark red lips. I asked her to whom she belonged, for she pleased me much when I saw her. She said, Zaid [Muhammad’s adopted son]. The Apostle gave Zaid the good news about her . (Ishaq: 186)
This damsel with ruby lips was Zaynab, the wife of his adopted son, Zayd, whom Muhammad married later by trickery. In Muhammad’s hallucination, Zaynab traveled from earth to paradise and then back to the land of her future husband. Nobody knows how she could be present in paradise before her death and without being tried by Allah on the Day of Judgment, which, according to Muslim belief, is yet to come.
In his dream, Muhammad saw the angel of death and the angel of tears. The latent dream-thoughts are revenge, anger, frustration and unhappiness (caused by frustration). Anger because he was ridiculed by the opponents, and frustration because his newfound religion was not shaping well. Hence, in spite of Allah being all-merciful, he did not see the angel of smile, angel of happiness, angel of love, angel of mercy, angel of kindness, angel of optimism and the angel of humanity. All these angels did not come to Muhammad because he was a creature of hate and revenge. His dreams were censored in his subconscious.
Another point demonstrates the fallacy of his al-Mi’raj. Though Muhammad took a visionary travel to the paradise, nowhere can we find any statement that he was awestruck neither by the previous Prophets whom he bragged to have visited in different skies nor by facing Allah himself. Were the demonic creatures, angels and Buraq more awe-inspiring than visiting legendary Prophets in the grandeur of the seven heavens and talking with Allah? The legendary Prophets and Allah did not have any awe-inspiring effect on him because the “picture” was already there in his subconscious mind. He just dreamed off the pre-fabricated picture according to his need.
All dreams are obstructed by dream-distortions which make the dream seems strange and unintelligible to us. For the children, there is hardly any distortion; for adults, the distortion is less; while for the neurotic patients, obviously it is much more. Often there are omissions, modifications, fresh groupings of the material; which are the activities of dream-censorship and instruments of dream-distortion. These two factors give the dream the strangeness on account of which the dreamer himself is not inclined to recognize it as his own production and makes “surprising discoveries” which confuse others.
The al-Mi’raj fascinates the Muslims so much that they try to redecorate the various dream-distortions of their Prophet to give some credibility to it. The unique physical appearance of Buraq – the half mule, half donkey with a human head – tells that it was a dream-distortion. Why Buraq did not resemble to an elephant? It is because Muhammad did not know how an elephant looks like. During those days there was no elephant in Arabia. Elephants are entirely vegetarian and most of Saudi Arabia is covered in desert with hardly any vegetation for these huge animals to survive. Muhammad loved donkey-riding and the name of his legendary donkey was Yafur (Warraq, 2000, p. 241). So Buraq was at least half donkey. Why a human head? It is because a creature with a human head is more intelligent than a creature with an animal head. Allah’s divine creature must be smart. I am not sure why the other half looked like a mule, or more scientifically, what was the unknown content for this “distorted substitute”, i.e., the half mule. Allah knows best!
According to Muhammad, the first heaven was of pure silver and the stars were suspended by chains of gold. Angels lay awake to guard it and to prevent the spirits from listening indiscreetly to celestial secrets. If heaven is an absolute spiritual place, why it was decorated with pure silver and gold – the earthly things which need to be guarded? Let me undo the distortion and remove the censorship. It is not unusual for a beggar to dream of a grand feast, or a cobbler to become a king, or a political novice to become the President of his state, or a greedy person like Muhammad to dream pure silver and chains of gold, etc. When a person is unhappy in real life, his secret wishes are often censored and rise up in his dream. The distortion is greater when the wishes that are to be satisfied by hallucination worsen.
Much stringent examination is needed to undo the distortion of other manifested elements; e.g., the angel larger than the world with seventy thousand mouths. We often hear of fabulous beasts in ancient mythology and folklore, which were no doubt “creative” imaginations. Though we call this as creative, actually this type of imagination is quite incapable of “inventing” anything. It only combines components that are strange to one another and makes a composite figure (Strachey & Gay, 1966, p. 211); as example; A is dressed like B, acts like C, thinks like D, and looks like E etc. This is what we call a composite structure. Buraq itself was a composite structure of a mule, donkey and a human. When the final product “condenses”, it takes totally a new shape which presents an alien appearance to the dreamer himself and much more so to anyone who is unacquainted with him personally.
2.6: Pre-conclusion: Divine Interpretation of Muhammad’s Hallucinations
“Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it.”
Sigmund Freud
“The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.”
Sir William Osler (1849 - 1919)
Muslims fail to recognize Muhammad’s hallucinations as figments of the distorted imagination of his sick mind and always look for some divine explanation to analyze them. This is primitive mentality. The psychic world of the Muslims and their state of consciousness has much similarity with the state of mind of a primitive man. The mentality of an archaic man (the word “archaic” means primal - original), retained by modern social people, is a serious subject matter of psychology.
Those archaic men had strange personalities. They used to flatly deny the most evident underlying connections, and instead of accounting for things as accidents or on reasonable grounds, should simply cling upon supernatural ideas, as example; witchcraft, spirit, sorcery, voodoo and the power of the tribal medicine men. For them the real explanation was always supernatural. But the fact is that those primitive men were no more logical or illogical than we are. Only difference is that their presuppositions were not the same as ours. It is a rational presupposition of ours that everything has a natural and perceptible cause. Similarly, the faith of the Muslims is based on certain presuppositions. Muslims simply assume (as if they “know” from their birth) that Muhammad was a Prophet and Qur’an contains purely God’s instructions. These two presuppositions are so strongly embedded in their minds that they completely obliterate the facts and accounts for no aspect of the authenticity of Muhammad’s prophethood. As Jung (1933, p. 119) commented, “ There are no misunderstandings in nature; they are only to be found in the realms that man calls ‘understanding’.”
This is the only reason Muslims fail to identify Muhammad’s so-called divine experiences as hallucinations. If a person changes his concept of reality in such a way as to ad
mit that all psychic happenings are real and no other concept is valid, then he will never find any contradiction in his views. Such a person with “voluntary blindness”, no matter whatever his conscious development or education or social status, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his mind. On every opportunity, he will take every painful effort to falsify reality and uphold Muhammad’s neurotic disorder as spiritual.
2.7: Conclusion
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable; must be the truth?”
Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of Four”
Muhammad’s first experience with Gabriel was a “Command hallucination”. In this type of hallucination, the command is clear and powerful from a mysterious voice that no one else can hear. People feel that they are being told what to do by an imposing or mythic figure. They are sometimes ordered to assassinate a prominent personality, sacrifice a human being or a child, or harm themselves by the wish of God, or devil, or demons, or angels, or aliens (Sagan, 1997, p. 131). These voices compel the patient to obey them by making him helpless at the mercy of it. If he is reluctant to comply, dire penalties are threatened. Voices usually do not introduce themselves, e.g., “This is God speaking”, is never heard. This leaves the patient wondering – Who would issue such a command? Who could speak inside my head? He assumes that it is God or Jesus or Satan or the Head of a covert spy agency, or criminals, or the leader of a gang.
Command hallucinations may devastate a person turning him to a cold-blooded, conscienceless killer. As example; Jeffrey Macdonald, who murdered his wife and two children in 1970, claimed that the “acid heads” had committed the crime. Macdonald was the subject of the book and movie Fatal Vision (McGinniss, 1989). Kenneth Bianchi, who raped, tortured and killed a dozen women, was mistakenly believed to have a multiple personality and crimes had been committed by “Steve” (O’Brien, 1985). Ted Bundy, a serial killer who killed several dozen of young women, claimed that a “malignant entity” had taken over his consciousness (Hare, 1993, p. 4). Very similar to Muhammad’s hallucination, all these are some kind of delusional psychic experiences. Stout (2005, p. 54) concludes that, when the human brain is impaired in this way, “The voices told me to do it” is not a joke but a horrifying reality and such a person can act on his delusional idea much against his conscience and will.