A king in a dream

The only king the Qur'an lets us watch dreaming had a whole court of advisers, and not one of them could read what he had seen. "A mixture of confused dreams," they said, and added that they were not people who knew how to interpret such things (Qur'an 12:44). The dream sat unread until a man who had been in prison remembered a fellow inmate.

That turns upside down the question people bring to this page. They ask what it means to see a king. The texts we have are about a king who saw, and about a royal comparison inside the Prophet's own dream, and neither is a reading of a dreamed king. We set out what each does give, and then what the dictionaries add on their own authority.

The ruler who needed a prisoner

The king's dream, as Surah Yusuf tells it, was 7 fat cows eaten by 7 lean ones, and 7 green ears of grain beside dry ones (Qur'an 12:43). When the freed prisoner reached Yusuf he called him a man of truth and asked for the meaning, so that he could go back to the people with it (Qur'an 12:46). The answer had nothing to say about the king's character or his own fate. It was an agricultural plan: 7 years of planting with the harvest left in its ears, then 7 hard years that eat the stores, then a year of rain (Qur'an 12:47-49). The dream concerned the realm, and the reading came out as policy.

Two details are easy to pass over. Yusuf did not hurry out of prison when the king sent for him. He asked first what had become of the women who cut their hands. Only after the king had questioned them, and the wife of al-Aziz had admitted the truth, did the king say again "Bring him to me", and once they had spoken he called Yusuf established and trusted (Qur'an 12:50-54). And the surah names this ruler الملك, the king, where the tyrant of Musa's story is Pharaoh (Qur'an 28:38). We know of no verse that explains the difference in titles, so we will not guess.

At the very end Yusuf lists two gifts in one breath: sovereignty, and what translators often render as the interpretation of dreams, in Arabic تأويل الأحاديث (Qur'an 12:101). To read the king stories in sequence with the rest of the surah, see the dreams of Surah Yusuf.

Kings who ruin, and a king who is chosen

The Qur'an gives no steady sign for a king, and that is the main thing to know. The queen of Saba (the Qur'an does not name her; tradition calls her Bilqis) says that kings, when they enter a town, ruin it and humble its honoured people (Qur'an 27:34). She speaks as if it were the rule of her world, before she meets Sulayman and submits (Qur'an 27:44). A king who seizes every good ship by force is the reason a boat belonging to poor sailors was deliberately damaged (Qur'an 18:79). The man who argued with Ibrahim about his Lord is introduced with kingship as the occasion for it (Qur'an 2:258).

Then the other side. When Talut is sent as king, his people object that he has no wealth, and the answer is that Allah chose him, increased him in knowledge and stature, and gives His sovereignty to whom He wills (Qur'an 2:247). The king of Egypt who trusts Yusuf (Qur'an 12:54) is neither villain nor saint in the text. He is a man who asks, and who listens when the answer comes. Over all of them stands the verse that Allah gives sovereignty and takes it away, honours and humbles (Qur'an 3:26).

A reader who wants a verse for "a king means good fortune" or "a king means oppression" can find one for each, which is why we class this symbol as contextual. The dictionaries' working answer follows the same logic. They read the king by what he does, and as whoever holds that kind of power over the dreamer. A king who gives, honours or listens is taken as favour from authority, one who threatens or takes as pressure from it. That is analogy and convention. The verses above describe real kings, not dreamed ones.

The kings on the sea, in Umm Haram's house

One afternoon the Prophet ﷺ slept in the house of Umm Haram bint Milhan and woke up smiling. Asked why, he said some of his followers had been shown to him in a dream as fighters in Allah's cause, sailing in the middle of the sea "like kings on thrones" (Bukhari 7001). The narrator Ishaq was unsure whether the words were "kings on thrones" or "like kings on thrones", a small sign of how carefully the report was handed on. Umm Haram asked him to pray that she be among them. He slept again, woke smiling again and told the same dream, and this time said she was among the first ones. Muslim 1912b has the same two naps and the same answer. Bukhari adds that she sailed in the caliphate of Muawiya and, after coming ashore, fell from her riding animal and died.

What this teaches about kings is narrower than it sounds. The kings here are a comparison. The people on the water looked as a king looks on his throne: seated, secure, honoured, with the open sea as their ground. The Prophet used the image as a picture of dignity for believers in a hard undertaking, and he was smiling as he told it. It is the one place we know of in the Sunnah where royalty appears inside a dream, and it points kindly. It does not make kings a good sign in general. The same Sunnah calls the name "king of kings", taken by a man for himself, the most awful in Allah's sight on the Day of Resurrection (Bukhari 6205), a warning about pride in waking life.

For the setting of that dream, see a ship.

Reading the king you saw

Everything in this table is a convention except the last row, and the third column says which is which. The tradition asks about the dreamer's situation first: someone who is waiting on a decision from an employer, an office or a court will hear "authority" more loudly than someone at peace with everyone.

When the figure is a president, a minister or a boss, we extend the same questions to them by analogy. Cars, phones and planes explains how far that kind of extension can honestly go.

Other seats of authority on this site: the judge, the palace and, in Yusuf's story, the prison that came before the court.