A Forty-Sixth Part of Prophecy

So the messengers are human beings, first and foremost. And they have a type of capacity that other individuals do not have, although we have a glimpse of it. And this is why the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said that a true dream is one forty-sixth of prophecy. One forty-sixth of prophecy. And anyone has access to a true dream — including, from the Muslim worldview, somebody who is not a Muslim; they can have a true dream. And this is an access; it is one forty-sixth of prophecy. In other words, it is an indication for the human being of the idea that we can know something that has not happened yet. And this happens to people. They will have a dream, a prescient dream, and then the actual thing happens. What is that? For many people, they do not understand. It happens to people, but they do not understand what it is — or what we call déjà vu: in French, the idea of having been here before. What is going on?

This is a type of remembrance. According to the Islamic tradition, we are remembering something. And this is arguably related to the Platonic tradition of memory as well. Plato felt that what we were here doing was simply remembering: that we are in a state of forgetfulness. And this is related in the Qurʾān to the idea of ghaflah. Ghaflah is heedlessness, or forgetfulness — that the human being by nature is forgetful.

Look at it in terms of Vanity Fair — and many of the scholars have used this analogy in commentaries. The servant is sent by the king to go to the marketplace and get something. But on the way to the marketplace there is a fair. Plenty of time, he thinks; the sun is high; a look at the fair first. He goes into the fair, and then suddenly: entertainment, suspension of disbelief, preoccupation; he gets lost in the fun. And before he knows it, the sun has gone down. The king sent him to the marketplace; the marketplace is closed; and his time was wasted in the vanity fair. This type of metaphor is related to this human condition, which is ghaflah: that we become immersed in a type of heedlessness. The world by its nature is powerful, in that human beings become preoccupied.

So how do we remind ourselves? How do we pull ourselves out of the vanity fair, and remind ourselves daily that this is the world — the world is temporal, and there is a journey coming? From the Muslim perspective, it is the reminder itself: dhikr.

Is God not immanent in the world? Immanent or transcendent — the answer is yes and no, and the explanation of that comes below. People are overpowered. The prophets come.