The keys of the earth's treasures, put in the Prophet's hand

Most dream hadith stand alone. This one arrives as the last item in a list of waking gifts: concise words, awe, and then, in the middle of the sentence, "while I was asleep". The dream is a single line, and it is easy to read past it. What makes it worth slowing down for is how much attaches to that line, and how little of it is the Prophet's own interpretation.

A list with a dream at the end

In Bukhari 7013 the Prophet ﷺ says three things in one breath. He was sent with جوامع الكلم (jawami' al-kalim). He was made victorious with awe. And while asleep the keys of the treasures of the earth were brought to him and put in his hand. The first two are statements about what he was given and are not dreams at all. Muslim 523a, a different report, has him listing 6 things in which he was favoured over the other prophets, beginning with the same two. The keys are not among the 6, so we cannot say the dream was meant as a further item in a list of distinctions, though the narrations place it directly after two of them.

Whose words are which? "Jawami' al-kalim" and "awe" are the Prophet's own. For the first, Bukhari 7013 adds a gloss from a narrator named only as Muhammad: it had reached him that the phrase means that Allah gathers into one or two statements the many matters that had been written in the earlier books. That is the narrator's explanation. The English parentheses elsewhere, such as "(cast into the hearts of the enemy)", are the translators'. The Arabic says only الرعب (al-ru'b), awe. The Prophet gives its reach in another report, awe for a distance of a month's journey (Bukhari 335), and the Qur'an uses the same word of what Allah casts into the hearts of those who disbelieved (Qur'an 3:151).

Five narrations, two routes

The four Bukhari versions and Muslim 523b look alike, yet they split into two groups by chain, and the first statement follows the chain. Bukhari 6998 runs through Ayyub and a "Muhammad". The rest (Bukhari 7013, Bukhari 2977, Bukhari 7273 and Muslim 523b) run through Ibn Shihab and Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib.

The difference between "keys of the words" and "sent with the comprehensive words" is real, and only Bukhari 6998 has the first. Two other details deserve a flag. In Bukhari 7273 the narrator is unsure of the verb: the text gives two near-spellings and then "or a word like it", so the exact wording of the remark is not settled. And in Bukhari 2977 the printed English ends with a bracket saying the Prophet "did not benefit by them". That bracket is the translator's reading, and nothing in the Arabic of the remark says it.

Keys, storehouses and who holds them

The dream's phrase is مفاتيح خزائن الأرض, keys of the treasures of the earth. The last two words, خزائن الأرض, are exactly what Yusuf asks for in the Qur'an: "Appoint me over the storehouses of the land", as a knowing guardian (Qur'an 12:55). Elsewhere the Qur'an gives keys a different weight. Qarun's treasures had keys that would burden a band of strong men (Qur'an 28:76), and his people told him not to exult. The keys of the unseen are with Allah alone (Qur'an 6:59), and the keys of the heavens and the earth belong to Him (Qur'an 39:63).

Those verses are ours to set beside the dream, not the Prophet's. He cites none of them, and the narrations give him no reading of the keys at all. What we can say is that the Qur'an has a vocabulary for this image in which a person may ask to be put in charge of the storehouses, keys can be a weight, and the keys that matter most belong to Allah.

The same Abu Huraira reports a dream in which treasures of the earth are followed by something else put on the Prophet's arms (Bukhari 4375, Muslim 2274b). That has its own page, the two gold bracelets, and we do not repeat it here. In the keys narrations nothing is worn, no unease is reported, and no interpretation follows.

The Prophet's worry and Abu Huraira's remark

The Prophet is recorded using nearly the same words while awake. After praying over the dead of Uhud he went to the pulpit and said that he saw his Fount at that moment and had been given the keys of the treasures of the earth, "or the keys of the earth". He added that he did not fear they would associate others with Allah after him, but that they would compete for it (Bukhari 1344, Muslim 2296a). The pulpit sentence does not mention sleep.

So when we ask what the keys meant, the sources give two things and neither is an interpretation of the dream by the Prophet. One is his waking fear. The other is Abu Huraira's remark, labelled as his, which says only what the people were doing. We would not go beyond that to promise a dreamer a fortune or to read a conquest into a dream of keys. The dictionary entries on a key and a treasure show where compilers have gone further.