The American University of Beirut (AUB) Press and the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahyan Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at AUB co-organized the launch of Tuḥfat al-Mulūk fī al-Taʿbīr, a newly edited 10th-century Arabic text on dream interpretation. The event featured a conversation between Dr. Lina Jammal, co-editor of the new edition, and moderator Rawane Helou, PhD candidate in the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at AUB.
Opening the discussion, Helou invited Dr. Jammal to reflect on how she first encountered the manuscript and the broader significance of dream literature in Arabic intellectual history. Jammal explained that Tuḥfat al-Mulūk is the earliest known dream manual authored by a political figure—Abū Aḥmad Khalaf al-Sijistānī, the 10th-century Emir of Sistan—making it a unique work in the genre, which is otherwise dominated by religious scholars and mystics.
The text, she noted, is as much a window into political and social dynamics as it is a manual for interpreting dreams. Al-Sijistānī presents dream symbolism through the lens of a ruler, offering insights that reflect concerns with authority, legitimacy, morality, and social order. His treatment of visions involving rulers, craftsmen, slaves, women, and children reveals the stratified worldview of his time, in which each social category carried specific symbolic weight.
A major theme in the discussion was the author’s interdisciplinary approach. Al-Sijistānī draws on medicine, astronomy, and mathematics to justify his interpretations—an effort that Jammal described as a “defensive strategy” aimed at legitimizing dream interpretation as an intellectual and systematic practice. By grounding his work in the sciences of his time, al-Sijistānī distances it from superstition and presents it as both methodical and spiritually meaningful.
Helou steered the conversation toward the text’s literary and cultural dimensions. Jammal described dream interpretation manuals as subtle commentaries on the societies that produced them. In Tuḥfat al-Mulūk, the reader finds coded reflections on justice, piety, power, gender, and even servitude. Because dreams were considered vehicles of divine communication in the Islamic tradition, the author was able to embed social and political messages within a theologically legitimate framework.
The session concluded with a lively Q&A in which attendees asked about connections between classical dream texts and modern psychological theories. Jammal emphasized the importance of respecting historical context, warning against retrofitting contemporary ideas onto premodern material. She also spoke about the challenges of preparing the edition—from collating manuscript variants to reconstructing damaged passages—and about the significance of making such works accessible to modern readers.
Tuḥfat al-Mulūk fī al-Taʿbīr is published by AUB Press as part of the Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan Series for Arabic and Islamic Texts. The edition is co-edited by Dr. Lina Jammal and Dr. Bilal Orfali, Sheikh Zayed Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at AUB. Their collaboration combines expertise in Arabic manuscript tradition, Islamic intellectual history, and classical Arabic literature, ensuring both scholarly rigor and clarity of presentation.
This publication marks the first time the text has been critically edited and made available to contemporary audiences. It offers researchers and students an invaluable resource for understanding how dreams were interpreted, categorized, and politicized in the medieval Islamic world. More broadly, it contributes to the growing academic interest in dream literature as a serious field of inquiry, one that bridges theology, politics, literature, and science.
Through this event, AUB Press and the Sheikh Zayed Chair reaffirm their commitment to promoting rigorous scholarship and reviving foundational texts from the Arab-Islamic heritage.
About AUB
Founded in 1866, the American University of Beirut bases its educational philosophy, standards, and practices on the American liberal arts model of higher education. A teaching-centered research university, AUB has more than 790 full-time faculty members and a student body of over 9000 students. AUB currently offers more than 140 programs leading to bachelor’s, master’s, MD, and PhD degrees. It provides medical education and training to students from throughout the region at its Medical Center that includes a full-service 365-bed hospital.
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