A garden in a dream

Abdullah ibn Salam was passing a circle of Companions when one of them said, "This man is from the people of Paradise." Qais ibn Ubada repeated it to him, and Abdullah's answer was a protest. They ought not to say what they have no knowledge of. What he had was a dream: a post fixed in a green garden, a handhold at the top, a servant at the bottom, and a voice telling him to climb (Bukhari 7010).

Of the hadith that tell a dream with a garden in it, this is the one where the Prophet's own words give the garden its meaning. It also turns on a word that dictionary lists rarely look at.

Rawda, janna, hadiqa: three words for one picture

The dictionary headword for a garden is حديقة (hadiqa), a walled orchard. The Qur'an uses it in the plural in only 3 verses, all about provision: gardens "of joyful beauty" that people could not have made grow (Qur'an 27:60), and "gardens and grapevines" among the gifts listed in Qur'an 78:32.

The Prophet's dream garden is another word entirely. In the Arabic of Bukhari 7014 it is a روضة (rawda), a meadow garden, and he said "that rawda is the rawda of Islam". The Qur'an uses rawda in only 2 verses, and both are about believers in Paradise: Qur'an 30:15 and Qur'an 42:22. He used it for a place in Madinah too, calling the space between his house and his pulpit "a garden of the gardens of Paradise" (Bukhari 1196). The third word is جنة (janna), the one the Qur'an uses for Paradise, and also for the gardens that were lost. Paradise is a janna and so are the ruined gardens below, which means one word carries both the reward and the thing that can be lost.

Three gardens lost, each for a different forgetting

In the three Qur'anic stories of a garden that disappears, each garden is a janna, and each was lost for a different reason. The first belonged to a man with two gardens of grapevines bordered with palms and a river between them. He entered his garden "unjust to himself", said he did not think it would ever perish, and had not said "What Allah willed" (Qur'an 18:32-44). The garden collapsed on its trellises and he turned his hands over in dismay, wishing he had not associated anyone with his Lord (Qur'an 18:42). His fault was forgetting that it could end.

The second was a garden whose owners swore to pick its fruit at dawn "without making exception" (Qur'an 68:17-33). An affliction struck it while they slept, and it became "as though reaped". When they went out to it they were whispering that no poor person should come in that day (Qur'an 68:24). Their fault, as the verses frame it, was greed toward the poor and not making exception, which the commentators take to mean not saying "if Allah wills". The third was the people of Saba, who had two gardens, right and left, and were told to eat from their Lord's provision and be grateful. They turned away, a flood came, and bitter gardens replaced theirs (Qur'an 34:15-16). Their fault was ingratitude. A ruined garden in a dream has 3 precedents, and they are warnings about attitude, not about fate.

The gardens the Prophet ﷺ saw and read

Two dream gardens in the Sunnah come with their meaning. Abdullah ibn Salam's is the first. When he told it to the Prophet, the answer was that the garden was Islam, the pillar was the pillar of Islam, and the handhold was the firm one, so that he would hold to Islam until he died (Bukhari 7014). Most of that reading is about the climb and the grip, which is where the dream's weight lies.

The second is in Samura's long dream, where the Prophet saw a garden of deep green and dense vegetation "of all sorts of spring colors", with a very tall man in it and a great number of children around him. The angels who were with him said that the man was Ibrahim and the children were those who die in the natural state of faith (Bukhari 7047). That vision came with its explanation, and it is not a rule for anyone else's dream. Our entries on Abdullah ibn Salam's dream and on Samura's dream go through each in full.