A “Big Dream” attributed to Osama bin Laden
[ by Charles Cameron — hadith, Aden-Abyan, Abu M. al-Maqdisi, major dream of young bin Laden, role of narration 1 month after his death, any comments? ]
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I was trying to follow up on a hadith which declares:
An army of twelve-thousand will come out of Aden-Abyan. They will give victory to Allah and His messenger. They are the best between myself and them.
There’s an extensive discussion of it on Somalinet offered by Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi [teh Sheikh Abu M al-Maqdisi?] and posted on June 4 of this year, but it doesn’t answer my question as to how this narration fits in with the various narrations about the army from Khorasan.
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While reading in and around this topic, however, I ran across this account of a dream on the young bin Laden, which appears on a number of sites favorable to jihad around June 4, 2011, i.e. after bin Laden’s death, and which I have not seen discussed on those analysts’ sites that I manage to follow.
It’s extremely interesting to me not only because dreams are potentially important vehicles for divine guidance in Islam, but also because it ties bin Laden specifically to the Khorasan / black banners hadith, and to the Mahdi. In this dream, I( don’t think it’s going too far to say that bin Laden himself plays a preparatory role with regard to the Mahdi that we can perhaps understand in the west as equivalent to that of John the Baptist in preparation for Christ.
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If this dream narrative has been explored in the open source analytic literature, I would be very interested to see what has been said. In the meantime, I will simply post the narration as I found it:
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This incident was narrated to me by a student of knowledge who spent more than 20 years in the company of scholars acquiring knowledge. He told me about a dream that Shaykh Osama bin Laden had when he was 9 years old, which indicated that Allah swt was preparing Shaykh Osama bin Laden, may Allah have mercy on him, since childhood, for battles against the Crusaders.
He told me that once he was sitting with a companion and discussing the deplorable condition of the Ummah but that all the incidents taking place in the Muslim Ummah are going according to Allah’s plan and that it is certain that the victory of Allah the Almighty will come. He will surely send a Leader and a Guide from amongst our Ummah who will deliver the humiliated and pitiful Ummah to the enlightened path of ascent and loftiness. We started thinking that who could be such a person!
Immediately, the thought of Shaykh Osama bin Laden came to our minds, since he has made innumerable sacrifices for the sake of the Ummah. On this, my companion smiled and said, “I will narrate to you a dream of Shaykh Osama bin Laden; you will be pleased to hear it, and your love for the mujahideen will only increase.”
He said, I was in al-Madinah al-Munawwarah at the house of a Scholar who used to lecture at the Prophet’s masjid. We had just arrived at his house when someone knocked on the door. The Shaykh returned with a person of luminous and honorable appearance who was about 80 years old.
The host welcomed him and requested the Tafsir of a few verses from the Qur’an. We quietly listened to him while the guest Shaykh recited a few verses, and then he gave the Tafsir of those verses. By Allah, I had studied a number of Tafsirs, but that Shaykh was a sea of knowledge. When he completed his lesson, the host invited him for a meal, but he declined politely, and we came to understand that he was fasting.
Eventually, the guest asked for permission to leave, but the host insisted, ‘Until you narrate to us the dream of Shaykh Osama bin Laden once more, you will not get the permission to leave.’
The Shaykh smiled and asked, ‘The dream that Shaykh Osama bin Laden had when he was 9 years old?’ The host replied in the affirmative.
This is how that Shaykh narrated the incident:
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