The moon in a dream

Ka'b ibn Malik, who had stayed behind from the expedition to Tabuk, remembered how he came to greet the Prophet ﷺ afterwards and found his face glittering with happiness. Then he explains the picture, as if to show he is not inventing a figure of speech on the spot: whenever Allah's Messenger was glad, his face shone as though it were a piece of the moon, and the Companions could read his mood from it (Bukhari 3556).

That is how the first Muslims reached for the moon in ordinary talk, to say that a face was lit from within. Keep it beside the Qur'an's drier account of the moon as a clock and a borrowed light. Dream dictionaries draw on both, and neither is a dream text.

A light that is lent

Qur'an 10:5 gives the sun and the moon two different words for light. The sun is ضِيَاء, a shining light, and the moon is نُور, which the translation renders as a derived light. Qur'an 71:16 says the same thing with a lamp for the sun and a reflected light for the moon, and Qur'an 25:61 sets a lamp beside a luminous moon. Then Qur'an 36:39 adds what the sun does not have: the moon changes. It is given stations to pass through until it comes back looking like an old date stalk, the thin, pale curve a palm leaves behind.

Put those verses together and the usual dictionary readings follow almost on their own, which is why we count them as the third step of the method, reasoning from the language of the texts, and not as received knowledge. A light that is borrowed suggests a person whose standing comes from someone else: a deputy, an adviser, a scholar who reflects the Book. A light that waxes and wanes suggests standing that rises and falls. That is an inference from the Qur'an's description, and no source reports the Prophet ﷺ reading a moon this way.

Yusuf's dream is the one place where the Qur'an itself puts the moon in a dream. It is one of 13 figures that bowed to him, with the sun and 11 stars (Qur'an 12:4), and the surah closes the dream when his family bows to him (Qur'an 12:100). The verse says "his parents" and does not say which of them the moon was. The sun walks through that dream; here it is enough to say that the moon in it was a person, not an event.

Faces like the full moon

Two more hadith use the moon the way Ka'b did. The Prophet ﷺ said that 70,000 or 700,000 of his followers would enter Paradise together, with faces like the moon on the night it is full (Bukhari 3247). And Jarir reports that the Prophet looked at the full moon and said the believers would see their Lord as they were seeing that moon, with no trouble in seeing Him, and that if they could, they should not be overcome by sleep or business and miss the prayer before sunrise or the prayer before sunset (Bukhari 7434).

In the first the moon is radiance, and in the second it is a clear, unobstructed view. Neither is a dream, and neither interprets one. They matter to the method because the step after the Qur'an is how the Prophet himself used an image, and for the full moon he used it for light on a face and for plain seeing. A reading of a bright full moon as beauty, honour or a matter made clear sits comfortably inside that usage, and it is the reading we would call best supported, though still not a text about dreams.

Crescent, waning, eclipsed, split

The crescent is the phase with the clearest job in a Muslim's year. People asked the Prophet about the new moons, and the answer was that they are measurements of time for the people and for Hajj (Qur'an 2:189). In practice the crescent opens and closes Ramadan: start fasting when you see it, and stop when you see the next (Bukhari 1909). A reading of a new crescent as a beginning, a period about to open, has more underneath it than most dictionary readings do, because it follows how the crescent is used awake.

A waning moon is a different matter. The stations in Qur'an 36:39 are the only text, and they say only that the moon changes. Reading its shrinking as a decline in whoever it stands for is our inference, and we would hold it loosely.

An eclipsed or darkened moon should be kept apart from rumour. The Prophet said the sun and the moon do not eclipse because of the death or birth of anyone, and that they are signs of Allah (Bukhari 1042). That was said of the waking sky, but it is the nearest text we have, and it points away from reading a dimmed moon as a death.

A moon split in two is in the sources, but awake. Qur'an 54:1 says the Hour has drawn near and the moon has split, and Abdullah ibn Mas'ud reports that it was split in two parts in the Prophet's lifetime, and the Prophet said: bear witness (Bukhari 3636). It is reported as a sign, and no one reports it as a dream image.