Who was Ibn Sirin?

Ibn Sirin was born into the first generation after the Companions — his father a freed slave of Anas ibn Malik's household, his mother likewise freed — and he grew into one of Basra's most trusted scholars: a transmitter of hadith the later critics graded among the most reliable, a jurist consulted on law, and a cloth merchant whose scrupulousness in trade became proverbial. The biographical works remember his piety with a certain dry humor — a man who wept by night and traded fairly by day, and who once sat out a debt-collector's claim in prison rather than swear an oath he was unsure of.

His dream readings, preserved as anecdotes in the classical literature, show a consistent method rather than a lookup table. He asked who the dreamer was before answering; he read the same image differently for the merchant and the scholar; he weighted the dreamer's state, season, and speech; and — the detail the tradition most cherishes — he frequently declined, saying he did not know. Interpretation, in his practice, was a responsibility exercised with fear of error, not a performance. That humility became the tradition's standard: taʿbīr belongs to knowledge, and a dream is never grounds for accusation or ruling.

The famous dictionaries bearing his name — the ones sold in every bazaar and quoted on every website, including in careful form on this one — are, by scholarly consensus, later compilations attributed to his authority rather than books from his hand. We use that corpus the way the tradition itself does: as the accumulated casebook of a school he founded in spirit, held to the standard he set — context first, humility always, and meaning rather than prophecy.