How many times have you come across a soothsayer - in whatever regalia? Perhaps you have visited one yourself in quest for meaning and solution to a problem that seems to take ages to go? Perhaps you may also have known afterwards that it is forbidden to do that as a Muslim. The future is known to no one except Allaah. Allaah says: "No person knows what he will earn tomorrow, and no person knows in what land he will die. Verily, Allah is All-Knower, All-Aware (of things)." (Q31 [Luqman]:34). Making predictions about the Unseen is a multifaceted coin.
One of it is what we see in all the leading newspapers. It is the horoscope. If you ever had occasion to read it, you would see that everything being said is so general that you could take the text given under one zodiacal sign and place it under another without any marked effect. The same applies to what you would see if you followed the horoscope month after month. The reason for this is that the game being played here is the same.
We can see another face of this coin in the supposed revelations of the sheikhs and malams who inform their clients about what has occurred in their past or what will occur in their future. This coin has another face that is very much in vogue these days the interpretation of dreams. Some people get into this business because they see that they can get out of it fame and a steady paycheck without having to do any real work. They can see that they need no special knowledge nor do they have to expend any effort in investigation.
All they have to do is listen to peoples dreams and then dish out a lot of vague and general answers in return. "You will have a problem and then it will be solved." "You will be put under difficulties and then you will find relief." People yearn for a glimpse of the future, so they cling to statements like these and relate them to the events of their lives. This is easy when the statements are so vague that they can at least partially apply to some situation or another.
Because people naturally desire to know the future, when they get statements like these, they buy into them readily and do not weary themselves by investigating what is really going on. Sheikh Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab, in his commentary on the hadith that a soothsayer tells a hundred lies for every one truth he brings, writes: "It implies that people will accept falsehood by clinging to one truth and ignoring a hundred lies." If we were to apply this "professional standard" of one in a hundred to our dream interpreters today, we would find that some of them would not even be able to measure up to it.
They get one hit for hundreds of misses. But people, in their gullibility, are willing to cling to that one instance and forget the rest. This is why a man in the business of selling knowledge of the Unseen finds many customers. We must mention that there is a difference between soothsayers coming with their vague pronouncements in the guise of dream interpreters and legitimate dream analysis. In every discipline there are professionals and charlatans.
Legitimate dream analysts are people of integrity who speak with knowledge and are not looking for stardom. Thus, taking advantage of the gullible on the pretense of dream interpretation is just like taking advantage of the sick by offering invocations. Both of these practices are often done in the name of religion. And success is with Allah alone.
This article was culled from the publications of Deen Communication Limited