The Institution of the Adhan: Abdullah ibn Zayd's Dream

Within the first month or two after the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah, a practical problem arose: how would people know when it was time for prayer?

❧The Consultation

The Prophet ﷺ gathered the Companions and posed the question. Various proposals were made:

- A bell (like the Christians), rejected. The Prophet ﷺ had an explicit dislike of bells. He had said that angels do not accompany any caravan that carries a bell. So a bell was out.

- A shofar / horn (like the Jews used in their call to prayer), also rejected. The Prophet ﷺ did not want to imitate the Yahūd either.

- Other ideas were proposed but none found agreement.

The meeting ended without a decision.

❧The Dream

That night, two Companions independently saw the same dream: ʿAbdullāh ibn Zayd al-Anṣārī and ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb.

ʿAbdullāh ibn Zayd dreamed of a man carrying the very bell they had been discussing. He approached the man and asked to buy it. The man asked why. ʿAbdullāh explained: "The Prophet ﷺ wants a way to call people to prayer; I thought a bell might work." The man said: "Shall I not tell you something better?"

And then the man in the dream recited, phrase by phrase, the words we know as the Adhān.

ʿAbdullāh woke up. The dream was so vivid, so immediate, that he threw on his clothes without fully arranging them and ran directly to the Prophet ﷺ. He recounted the entire dream.

The Prophet ﷺ said: "Innaha la-ruʾyā ḥaqq, inshaAllāh.", "This is indeed a true dream, Allāh willing."

Then he told him: "Take Bilāl with you. Bilāl has the strongest voice. Tell him the phrases one by one and he will proclaim them."

So ʿAbdullāh went to Bilāl, and they went together to the rooftop of the newly-built mosque. ʿAbdullāh stood below and called out each phrase. Bilāl repeated it from the roof, in the powerful voice that had once been made to lie flat on the burning sands of Makkah in the name of these exact words.

Allāhu Akbar. Allāhu Akbar. Allāhu Akbar. Allāhu Akbar. Ashhadu an lā ilāha illā Allāh...

As the call rang out over Madinah for the first time, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb came sprinting into the mosque, his lower garment still not tied. He said: "Ya Rasūlallāh, I heard these exact phrases in my dream!" So Allāh had shown the same vision to multiple Companions.

❧A Unique Precedent

The Adhān holds a singular place in the structure of Islamic law: it is the only element of the Sharīʿah whose specific wording was delivered through the dream of a Companion. Every other ruling came from the Quran or from the Prophet's instruction directly. The Adhān came from a dream.

But the authority of the Adhān is not the dream. It is the Prophet ﷺ's approval: "Innaha la-ruʾyā ḥaqq." Islām does not build law on dreams. But when the Prophet ﷺ says a dream is true, his verification makes it Sharīʿah. Without that ratification, it would have been a personal dream of no legislative weight.

❧ʿAbdullāh ibn Zayd: Ṣāḥib al-Qiṣṣah

Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī records that ʿAbdullāh ibn Zayd al-Anṣārī is known as Ṣāḥib al-Qiṣṣah, the one of the story, and that this is essentially the only remarkable thing recorded about him. There are no famous battles attributed to him, no extensive corpus of ḥadīth, no great theological statements. Just this one night, this one dream, this one moment. That is how Allāh distributes honor: sometimes through entire lifetimes of deed; sometimes through a single night.

The iqāmah, the second call, given just before the prayer itself begins, was also seen in the same dream (or derived from it). Its wording is the same as the Adhān, with the addition of "qad qāmat al-ṣalāh" (the prayer has stood) twice, after the final ḥayya ʿalā al-falāḥ.