Umar's trailing shirt: the dream of the people in shirts

Most of the Prophet's dreams that we know of are about what happened or what would. This one is about measure. He saw people paraded before him, each in a shirt, and what he noticed was how long the shirts were.

A dream in which the length of the cloth is the message

Abu Sa'id al-Khudri reports it three ways in Bukhari, with small differences in wording. The Prophet ﷺ said that while sleeping he saw people shown to him wearing shirts: some reached only the breast, some a little below. Then Umar ibn al-Khattab was shown to him in a shirt he was dragging behind him. The Companions asked what he made of it, and he said: "the religion" (Bukhari 7008, Bukhari 7009, and Bukhari 23 in the Book of Faith).

The reading is immediate once you see that it is a dream about covering. A shirt covers the body, and the Qur'an already uses clothing as a picture of piety: "the clothing of righteousness, that is best" (Qur'an 7:26). A longer shirt covers more, so more religion. The one who trails his shirt is the one whose covering is, so to speak, overflowing.

That is the interpretation, and it is the Prophet's. The commentators' contribution is to point out the thing the dream leaves implicit, that the images work as a scale. Shirts of different lengths are different amounts of the same thing, and people are shown differing. It is why Bukhari files the hadith in the Book of Faith (Bukhari 23 is there), as proof that people vary in how much faith and religious practice they carry.

What a shirt carries in the Qur'an

The word has a long life in Surah Yusuf, where the shirt appears at three turning points.

A garment in this story is witness, vindication and cure. None of those is an interpretation of a dream, and none of them says what a shirt means when you see one asleep. But they explain why an interpreter reading the Prophet's dream would not find the image odd. In the world of the Qur'an a shirt is already a carrier of meaning about integrity and standing, and the dictionaries' entries on the shirt and on white clothes draw on both.

Umar in four of the Prophet's dreams

Umar turns up in more of the Prophet's dreams than any other Companion, and putting them together is instructive. In one he receives the rest of a cup of milk, which the Prophet ﷺ reads as knowledge (Bukhari 7006). In this one, he trails a shirt that stands for religion (Bukhari 7008). In another, the Prophet ﷺ is at a well and Umar takes the bucket and draws on it until the people have drunk and watered their camels, with a strength the Prophet ﷺ says he had never seen in a man doing such work (Bukhari 7019). And in a fourth he is shown a palace in Paradise and is told it belongs to a man of Quraysh, and the Prophet ﷺ turns back because he remembers Umar's sense of honour (Bukhari 7024).

Knowledge, religion, capable service, reward. Read together they sketch what the Companions understood of Umar, and they are the reason his name keeps appearing in interpretations. They are also a warning against over-reading. The Prophet ﷺ dreamed of many others, and the hadith collections preserve the ones that were told and interpreted, so a pattern in what survives is not a ranking of what the Prophet ﷺ thought.

What the dream does not say

It is tempting to read this as a ranking, with Umar at the top and the rest below, and to apply it to people we know. The hadith does not support that. It names one person, and it makes no claim that the chest-length shirts were the Companions or that the dragging one means the best of them. What it says is that the Prophet ﷺ saw people at different levels, one of them far ahead, and that the measure was religion.

The sharper lesson, to us, is in what the Prophet ﷺ did not do. He did not announce that Umar's religion was greater than his neighbours'. He reported what he saw, and when asked, he said what it meant. The Companions asked what he had interpreted and received a one-word answer. A reader who tries to extract more should be careful to say which part is the Prophet's word, and which part is their own inference from it.

For the same hadith's companion, the cup of milk given to Umar that the Prophet ﷺ read as knowledge, see the milk the Prophet gave to Umar. For a third Umar dream, in which the Prophet ﷺ is shown a palace in Paradise, see Umar's palace in Paradise.