Dreaming of Jasmine in Islam

Jasmine is read by whether it is on the plant or cut. Jasmine still growing and in flower is the settled good reading: a person of gentle manner in the household, or a pleasure that is present and in its proper season. Cut jasmine, or flowers given as a gift, is read as a kindness done — something offered for no return, which is how the older interpreters took it. Jasmine that has wilted in the hand is the reading people most often arrive at: a joy that did not last, or a person whose company was brief. Its scent without seeing it is read as good spoken of a person in his absence — a reputation arriving before the man. Scattering jasmine over someone was read as praise, and over a grave the careful interpreters refused to read at all, holding that nothing about the dead is settled by a dream. A jasmine plant that dies shifts the reading onto neglect of something delicate rather than onto any loss.

No Qur'anic image stands behind jasmine and no idiom does either. The word itself came into Arabic from Persian, so there is no root to argue from, and it should not be invented. What the interpreters connected it to is what the flower plainly is: white, fragrant out of proportion to its size, and short-lived once picked. A thing whose whole value is in a quality that does not keep. That is the entire basis of the reading, and it is enough — the symbol of fleeting pleasure needs no more support than the flower gives it.

A dream of jasmine is not an omen about anyone's life being short, and reading it that way goes far past what the symbol carries. It is not a ruling and it foretells nothing. Scent and flowers are among the things a sleeper's own day produces most easily. If the dream left you uneasy, seek refuge in Allah, turn onto your other side, and do not relate it to anyone.