A tree in a dream

Ibn Umar knew the answer and felt too shy to give it. The Prophet ﷺ had asked the Companions to name a tree whose leaves do not fall and which is like a Muslim. Everyone began thinking of the trees of the desert. Ibn Umar thought of the date palm and said nothing, until the others gave up and asked, and the Prophet told them: it is the date palm (Bukhari 61). When Ibn Umar told his father what he had been thinking, Umar said he would have preferred that Ibn Umar had spoken to having some great possession (Bukhari 131).

It is a famous place in the Sunnah where a tree is compared to a person. It was a riddle in waking life, not a dream, and it works because the Qur'an had already drawn the same picture.

Root, branch, fruit and leaf

The picture is in Qur'an 14:24-26. A good word is likened to a good tree with its root firmly fixed and its branches in the sky, giving fruit all the time "by permission of its Lord". The bad word is the reverse: a bad tree "uprooted from the surface of the earth", with no stability. The passage lists the parts of a tree one by one, and each carries a point. The root is what holds. The branches are reach. The fruit is benefit, and the verse says it comes in every season. A tree without a root is not even standing.

The Prophet's riddle adds a fourth part, the leaves that do not fall (Bukhari 61). So when the dictionaries read a tree as a person or a work, they have a ready checklist from the sources: is it rooted, how high does it reach, does it fruit, does it keep its leaves? A tall, bare, dry tree and a small, green, heavy one are not the same dream, and the Qur'an would not have called them the same. What grows on the tree has entries of its own, such as dates, grapes and olives.

Trees that carry a story

Several Qur'anic trees are tied to a scene, and the scene is the meaning. Maryam, in labour, was driven to the trunk of a palm tree and wished she had died, and was told to shake the trunk so that fresh dates would drop on her (Qur'an 19:23-25). Provision, in that picture, arrives in the middle of pain. Qur'an 48:18 has Allah pleased with the believers "when they pledged allegiance to you under the tree", and sends tranquillity down on them. And Musa was called "from the tree" in the blessed spot (Qur'an 28:30).

The other side is the forbidden tree. Adam was told not to approach it (Qur'an 7:19), and Shaytan's pitch was that it was a "tree of eternity" (Qur'an 20:120) which would give him lasting possession. Here the tree is the temptation, with a promise attached. Qur'an 7:20 has the same promise in other words: that they would become angels or immortal. A tree that arrives with a promise in a dream has this verse as its nearest cautionary precedent.

Trees in the dreams the Sunnah tells

Three hadith tell dreams in which trees appear. In the first, the Prophet ﷺ said that two men came to him in his sleep and made him climb a tree, and then admitted him into a house better than any he had seen. They told him it was the house of the martyrs (Bukhari 2791). The tree is the way up.

The second was told by a man to the Prophet. He had been praying behind a tree, and when he prostrated the tree prostrated with him, and he heard it say a prayer for reward and acceptance, such as Allah accepted from Dawud. The Prophet then recited a verse of prostration, prostrated, and said the same words, according to Ibn Abbas (Tirmidhi 3424). That hadith is outside Bukhari and Muslim, with a grade of hasan printed beside it, and we mention it for the picture and not as a foundation. The Qur'an says trees prostrate to Allah (Qur'an 55:6, Qur'an 22:18), so the dream matches a fact the book already states. The Prophet did not interpret it as a symbol. He did what the tree said.

The third, the Prophet's dream of migrating to a land of date palms, shows trees standing for a place. He guessed it was Yamama or Hajar, and it turned out to be Madinah (Bukhari 3622). Our entry on the broken sword, the cows and the land of palms goes through it.