Cars, phones and planes: symbols the classical books never saw

After telling of the laden ship that carried people's forefathers, Surah Ya-Sin adds that Allah created for them "from the likes of it" what they ride (Qur'an 36:41-42). The verse does not say what the likes are, and we do not claim it points to engines. It does hand us a habit of thought. When a thing is new, you do not invent a meaning for it. You look for its likeness among the old things, and the Qur'an elsewhere puts ships and riding animals in one class by what they are for (Qur'an 43:12-13).

Five questions to put to a new symbol

We searched the English of the Qur'an and of the 6 hadith collections in our reference set for car, aeroplane, telephone, television and computer, and found nothing. The classical dream books could not mention such things either. So the first answer is always the same, and the method begins after it.

1. Is there a text? No. Say so before anything else, and mark every reading that follows as analogy.
2. What job does the thing do for a person? A car and a ship carry you. A phone carries a voice or a message. A screen shows what is elsewhere. A lamp or a bulb gives light. Function is the handle we use. The Prophet's own readings, such as milk read as knowledge (Bukhari 7006) and a trailing shirt read as the religion (Bukhari 7008), give the equation and do not state the reason, so reading by function is our inference from them and not a method they state.
3. Which old image does the same job, and what does its own reading rest on? A near neighbour with a verse or hadith behind it is worth more than one with only a dictionary convention.
4. What is different? An animal has a will of its own and tires, a machine does neither, and a phone is in your hand all day in a way a ship never was. Differences shrink the analogy.
5. How much of this is simply your day? The nearer the object is to your daily life, the likelier the dream is the mind's own talk.

On the language step, one example is worth giving. The modern Arabic word for a car is سيارة sayyara, and the Qur'an uses the same word for the company of travellers who came to the well and found Yusuf in it (Qur'an 12:10, Qur'an 12:19). That is Arabic usage doing what it does in the classical method, and it points to the family of travel. It does not make a car dream a dream about Yusuf's caravan.

Seven modern things and their nearest old images

This table lists the old image each modern object is closest to and what the reading would rest on. Our own rating of strength is in the last column, and no row is better than analogy.

When the object is simply part of your day

Most people handle a phone, a car or a screen many times a day. For such an object the first account of a dream is the one the Prophet gave in plain words: some dreams are a suggestion of one's own mind (Muslim 2263a). The mind rehearses what it has just been busy with. We would not say more than that, and we would not offer a reading to anyone who disliked the dream.

If you did dislike it, the Sunnah does not ask you to decode the dream. It asks you to seek refuge in Allah and tell no one, since it will not harm you (Bukhari 6985). The reading in the table is for a dream you woke from calm or curious. Even then, ask what you were doing with the object before you slept. If the honest answer is "using it for an hour", you already have the likeliest source.

Five ways to over-read a modern symbol

• Reading the brand, the model or the colour. No text supports it, and we found none of these readings that we could trace to a source. Adding a colour to a reading that is already an analogy stacks a second guess on the first.
• Attaching an early name to it. The classical works were written before these objects existed. A line that says an early scholar read a phone as such and such was written later, by someone else.
• Treating the analogy as a forecast. The readings the Sunnah gives on the Prophet's own authority were his, for particular dreams. Ours are guesses, labelled, and they predict nothing.
• Forgetting that a careful reading can be partly wrong. Abu Bakr read the cloud, the rope and the butter and honey in a man's dream, and the Prophet told him he was right in part and wrong in part (Bukhari 7046). If that can happen to him, it can happen to a table on a website.
• Deciding anything on it. A dream decides no ruling and no choice, as can dreams be true in Islam explains, and the sorting of any dream into its kind comes first, in the three kinds of dreams. For the whole sequence applied to your own dream, see how to interpret your own dream.