Umar's palace in Paradise, and the Prophet who turned back

Bukhari gives this hadith in 8 versions, spread over 4 different books, and the English alone would not tell you it is one story. In one telling a woman performs her ablution beside the palace. In another the palace is gold and nobody is mentioned. In a third the Prophet ﷺ hears Bilal's footsteps before he sees anything. What never changes is a moment of restraint: he stands at the door of a palace in Paradise and does not go in.

Four Companions tell it, and each sees something different

Abu Huraira, Jabir, Anas and Abu Buraidah carry the hadith between them, and the differences follow the narrators. The table sets them side by side.

Three details are easy to lose. The angels who answer in the English of Bukhari 7023 are a translator's bracket, and the Arabic says only "they said". In Bukhari 5226 the narrator is unsure of his own verb ("I entered Paradise, or I came to it"), and in Muslim 2394a of the building. And in Tirmidhi 3688 the Prophet ﷺ supposes that a gold palace, said to belong to a young man of Quraysh, must be his own, and has to ask who the man is.

Outside Bukhari and Muslim, our data grades Ibn Majah 107 sahih and gives the 2 Tirmidhi narrations grades from hasan to sahih, so we cite them beside the two collections and never instead of them.

Ghira, and the word the translators cannot settle on

The reason the Prophet ﷺ gives is one word, غيرة. The English in our data renders it "self-respect", "jealousy", "protective jealousy" and "feelings", and in Bukhari 3242 the translator adds a bracket, "(concerning women)", that is not in the Arabic. The Sunnah uses the word widely. When Sa'd ibn Ubada said what he would do if he found a man with his wife, the Prophet asked whether they wondered at Sa'd's ghira, and said that he had more of it than Sa'd, and Allah more than he (Bukhari 6846). Allah's own ghira, he said, is stirred when a believer does what Allah has forbidden (Bukhari 5223).

Umar's was known without any dream. In Bukhari 900 one of his wives keeps attending the dawn and night prayers in the mosque, and someone asks why, since she knows he dislikes it and has great ghira. Her answer is a question: what stops him from forbidding it? The reply is a saying of the Prophet, not to keep Allah's women servants from His mosques. The sources show the trait as strong, and answered by an instruction.

What the dream hadith leaves unsaid is what the ghira was about. In Abu Huraira's narrations a woman is performing ablution beside the palace, and the translator of Bukhari 3242 reads the ghira as concerning women. In Bukhari 5226 and Bukhari 7024 there is no woman at all, and the Prophet gives the same reason. Reading her into the scene is possible, but it is a reading and not the text.

Umar's reply is as short as the reason. In the Arabic it is a brief question, أعليك أغار, "over you, would I feel ghira?" (Bukhari 3242, Bukhari 5226). The English "how dare I think of my ghira being offended by you" is the translators' expansion, and in Muslim 2394a the verb is passive: "is ghira felt over you?" He weeps in the Abu Huraira narrations and in Muslim 2394a. In Bukhari's Jabir narrations he answers, and weeping is not mentioned.

What the dream shows, and what it leaves alone

Nobody interprets this dream. The answer to "whose is it?" comes from speakers inside the dream, and the Prophet ﷺ reports it and says why he did not go in, in Bukhari's narrations with Umar listening. That is the difference from Umar's other dreams: in the milk, the shirt and the well, Umar is a figure in the dream. Here he is in the room.

Bukhari himself turned the hadith into four different things, by filing it in four books: Beginning of Creation (Bukhari 3242), Companions of the Prophet (Bukhari 3680), Wedlock (Bukhari 5227) and Interpretation of Dreams (Bukhari 7023). As we read them, each filing foregrounds a different strand: Paradise, a Companion's standing, a husband's protectiveness, a vision. They are the compiler's placement, and none is stated by the Prophet.

The text also makes no comparison. It names Umar's palace and no other Companion's. Bukhari 3679 adds Rumaisa and Bilal's footsteps but no palace of theirs, and nothing says that the gold or the size marks a rank. The hadith's word is قصر, qasr, a palace. The Qur'an describes the dwellings of Paradise with other words, among them "pleasant dwellings" (Qur'an 9:72) and chambers built one above another (Qur'an 39:20). We cite those as vocabulary only: neither verse interprets this dream.

For the three other dreams in which Umar is shown, see the milk the Prophet gave to Umar, the shirt he trailed and the bucket at the well. For how the dictionary entries treat the image, see a palace in a dream and Paradise in a dream.