The black woman with unkempt hair who left Madinah

Bukhari prints this dream three times in a row, in entries so alike that the second and third can look like a copying slip. They are not. Each comes down a slightly different line of teachers, and the small differences between them show how carefully the wording was kept. The dream itself fits in one line: a black woman with unkempt hair walks out of Madinah and stops at a place called Mahaya'a. Everything else is the Prophet's one-sentence reading and a handful of questions the sources leave open, beginning with why her hair is mentioned at all.

Five tellings of one sentence

Ibn Umar is the narrator in all of them, reporting the Prophet ﷺ. The three Bukhari entries (Bukhari 7038, Bukhari 7039, Bukhari 7040) and Tirmidhi 2290 run through different teachers at the lower end, then meet at Musa ibn 'Uqba, who has the report from Salim, who has it from his father Ibn Umar. Ibn Majah 3924 gives the same text from Ibn Umar. So we have 5 printings of one report, not 5 separate witnesses, and the wording moves by a word here and there.

What a table cannot show is whose words are whose. "I saw" and "I interpreted" are the Prophet's, in the first person, in every version. The clause "which is al-Juhfa" is less certain. It sits next to the place name in two tellings and trails the interpretation in the other two, and a clause that wanders like that reads as a narrator's explanatory aside. No text labels it, so we mark it as probably explanatory and go no further.

Two smaller points. The English printed for Tirmidhi says the epidemic "would spread", but the Arabic verb is the one Bukhari uses, to move, in the present tense, and no version says spread. And the translators spell the place name Mahai'a, Mabaya'ah and Al-Mahya'ah, while all 4 Arabic texts have مهيعة.

Fever, epidemic, plague: three words in three sayings

Set the dream beside what the Prophet ﷺ said while awake about Madinah's sickness, and a pattern in the vocabulary shows. When he reached the city, Abu Bakr and Bilal fell ill with fever, and Aisha calls it the most unhealthy of Allah's lands (Bukhari 1889). Her word is أوبأ (awba'), from the same root as the dream's word. The Prophet asked that Madinah be made as dear to them as Makkah or more, and that its fever be moved to al-Juhfa (Bukhari 6372, Muslim 1376a). The word there is حمى (humma), fever. In a third saying he states that angels guard the entrances of Madinah and that neither the plague nor the Dajjal will be able to enter it (Bukhari 1880). The word there is الطاعون (ta'un).

So the prayer says fever, the dream says epidemic, and the promise says plague. The hadith do not define the 3 terms for us, and we will not pretend to. We say "epidemic" when we describe the dream because that is its word, and we keep "plague" for the angels' guard.

One more thing about the dream's own language. The woman is never said to carry anything, bring anything or touch anyone. The only things that happen are that she goes out and that she stops. It is the interpretation that turns a walk into the transfer of a disease.

What the Prophet's sentence gives us, and what it leaves

The Prophet ﷺ reads the dream by movement. She goes out of one place and stops in another, and he takes that to be an epidemic going out of Madinah and settling elsewhere (Bukhari 7038). That is the whole logic, and it is his. Two details in the picture get no reading at all: that she is black, and that her hair is unkempt. The texts do not explain them, and neither will we. The parts of the picture that the interpretation uses are that she goes out and that she stops. Whether the Prophet meant the other details to carry weight is not stated, and nothing in the narrations turns them into a statement about any people.

Nothing in the narrations reports what became of Madinah or of al-Juhfa afterwards. The hadith ends at the interpretation, and it is a report of what the dream showed, not a record of what followed. Any later account of fevers in either place comes from outside these texts, and we rest nothing on it.

The Ibn Umar who narrates this dream is also the dreamer in another one, taken up in Ibn Umar's dream of Hell and the night prayer. For a dream in which a place was named only after events, see the broken sword, the cows and the land of palms. The dictionary entries on hair and on Makkah and Madinah show what the compilers make of those images, which is a separate matter from this hadith.