Dreaming the World and Capturing the Supernatural in Medieval Persian Histories

A consistent feature of Persian historiographic literature is the pervasiveness of dream and vision sequences. Recent scholarship has attempted to deal with this supernatural material in a historical way, interrogating not only the efficacy of a dream but also the social worlds embedded in it. To contribute to these discussions, this paper analyzes dreams in Persian sources from 14th-16th century Anatolia and western Iran. It identifies not only a shared language of dreaming, but the repetition and transmission of dreams across otherwise disconnected social circles. These dreams allow us to draw alternate historical trajectories that reveal associations and influences that have hitherto escaped the notice of historians.

This paper will begin with an overview of dreams in Sufi hagiographical sources, focusing on Aḥmad-i Aflākī’s early 14th century Manāqib al-ʿArifīn, a text from Konya about the poet-saint Rumi and his followers. It will then show how the language and themes used in its dreams and visions influenced a court history written in Sivas in 1398 CE for a small regional dynasty. That history, titled Bazm wa Razm and written by ʿAzīz al-Dīn Astarābādī for his patron, Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad, is unique in that it marks the full adaptation of Sufi literature for the purposes of statecraft. The utility of this adaptation will be clarified through mapping its dream itineraries to show how they captured the supernatural for the king’s political project. This paper will then draw a trajectory from these earlier dreams to the use of dream narratives in Safavid sources. Their indebtedness to Bazm wa Razm and Manāqib al-ʿArifīn has hithertho been unnoticed precisely because the memetic social experience of dreaming has not been taken seriously. This alternate genealogy helps complicate our understanding of not only the Safavid revolution but also the role of dreams in later Islamic historiography.