Norulingisbuiltonadream

The principle

The scholars express it as a formula: lā yanbanī ʿalā al-ruʾyā ḥukm sharʿī — no ruling of the sharia is built upon a dream. The fatwa literature states it flatly, and it is presented as settled rather than as one opinion among several.

It rules out more than people expect.

A dream cannot make a thing lawful or unlawful — not a marriage, a divorce, a business or a treatment. It cannot confirm a diagnosis, including when it matches every item on a symptom list. It cannot name a person; seeing a relative in a dream about harm is evidence that you were thinking about that relative, and nothing further. And it cannot instruct, even where the dream is a good one and even where somebody revered appears in it and gives an instruction.

Why the line is drawn so firmly

Because the alternative has no floor beneath it.

If a dream could establish anything, then anybody's dream could establish anything, and there would be no means of weighing one against another. A person who woke convinced would be unanswerable. And anybody wishing to move you would need only to describe a dream, since the account of a dream cannot be checked by anyone.

That is not a hypothetical difficulty. It is among the ordinary tools used on frightened people: I was shown in a dream that you are afflicted; I was shown that you must return for six more sessions; it was shown to me who did this to you. A person who accepts that a dream can establish something has given up the ability to check anything at all.

The relief in it

The principle is usually presented as a restriction, and it is better understood as a permission.

It means that the dream a person cannot stop turning over requires nothing of them. There is no action to take, no decision to reach, nobody to confront, and no part of a life to rearrange around it. It was a dream, and one is allowed to leave it where it is.

For somebody who has carried one for months — and a great many people do — that is not a technicality. It is permission to put something down that they were never obliged to pick up.

What a dream can be

It can be glad tidings, and a person may be glad of them. It can be a reminder that moves somebody to repent, or to pray, or to mend something they had let go, and those are good outcomes whatever produced them.

What it cannot be, in the religion, is evidence.