A market in a dream

What sort of messenger is this, who eats food and goes about the markets? The sneer comes from people who wanted a prophet to look like something else, an angel perhaps (Qur'an 25:7). It is the market's first appearance in the Qur'an, and it is a charge against the Prophet ﷺ for being ordinary. The answer comes a few verses later, and it is the thing to remember when a market turns up in sleep: every messenger before him ate food and walked in the markets too (Qur'an 25:20).

So the Qur'an's market is not a symbol of anything sinister, and not a holy place either. It is where ordinary life happens. The Sunnah complicates that picture in a useful way, and no verse or hadith tells us what a dreamed one means.

A place called hateful, and a place full of Companions

The harshest sentence is also one of the shortest. Abu Huraira reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said the parts of land dearest to Allah are its mosques and the parts most hateful to Allah are its markets (Muslim 671). The hadith gives no reason, and we will not invent one.

Set it beside what the Sunnah shows people doing in them. When 'Abd al-Rahman ibn 'Awf reached Madinah as an emigrant, the Ansari Sa'd ibn al-Rabi' offered him half his wealth, and he refused it and asked only whether there was a market where trade was done. He was directed to the market of Qaynuqa' and began going each morning (Bukhari 2048). Others in the Prophet's day went to the market as porters when he called for charity, earning a mudd of grain in order to give it away (Bukhari 1416). When Muslims at Hajj hesitated to trade in the old markets of 'Ukaz, Majanna and Dhu al-Majaz, fearing it was sinful, the verse that settled it said there is no blame in seeking bounty from your Lord (Bukhari 2098, Qur'an 2:198).

Both things are in the sources, and they do not contradict each other, because the Sunnah answers with conduct. A man who displayed goods in the market and swore falsely to a better price was the occasion for a verse about those who sell Allah's covenant and their oaths for a small price (Bukhari 2088, Qur'an 3:77). And the description of the Prophet in the Torah, reported by 'Abdullah ibn 'Amr, includes that he is not a noisemaker in the markets (Bukhari 2125). The market is where you can earn a clean living and where you can slip. Which one it was depends on what you did there.

Trade as the Qur'an's picture of the self

The Qur'an uses commerce as a way of talking about deeds, and that is the closest thing to a footing for reading a dreamed market. Those who bought error at the price of guidance made a trade with no profit (Qur'an 2:16). Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and property in exchange for Paradise, and they are told to rejoice in the bargain (Qur'an 9:111). Those who recite the Book, pray and spend can hope for a trade that will never perish (Qur'an 35:29), and a believer is asked whether he wants a transaction that saves from a painful punishment (Qur'an 61:10).

The same vocabulary has a warning in it. When the Friday call is given, trade is to be left for the remembrance of Allah, and afterwards people are told to disperse and seek His bounty (Qur'an 62:9, Qur'an 62:10). A people who once rushed off at the sight of a transaction or a diversion, leaving the Prophet ﷺ standing, are told that what is with Allah is better (Qur'an 62:11). And there are men whom neither commerce nor sale distracts from remembrance, prayer and zakat (Qur'an 24:37).

None of these verses mentions a dream, and the dictionaries do not claim they do. The broad convention in popular compilations ties the market to livelihood, trade and worldly business, and reads a dream by what went on in it. We can add that the Qur'an's own language of profit and loss fits that convention, and that is all we can add.

Look at what was on the stall

The Prophet's dream of the fresh dates of Ibn Tab (Muslim 2270) was read through the fruit and the names in it, not through the house where it was set. A market is the same sort of frame: it holds goods, and the goods are where the specific meaning lives. A dream of a stall of dates or bread reads from those entries, one of gold from that one, and a dream of money changing hands from that.

What the dreamer is living through matters too: a trader, a worker and someone with no connection to trade will find different things in the same stalls, and the method of reading your own dream begins there. And as with every entry here, the three kinds of dreams come first: a crowded, ordinary scene is easy material for the mind to rework from a day's errands, and many such dreams need no reading at all.