“Whenever Ibn Sīrīn was told by a man that he had seen the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, he would say: ‘Describe to me the one you saw.’ If he described to him a feature he did not recognize, he would say: ‘You did not see him.’”
The eminent scholar Ibn Rushd held the same view. As cited in al-Iʿtiṣām by Imam al-Shāṭibī (1/355), he said: “The meaning of his statement, peace and blessings be upon him, ‘Whoever sees me has truly seen me,’ is not that everyone who sees in his dream that he has seen him has in fact seen him. The proof is that one person may see him repeatedly in different forms, while another sees him in one form and someone else in another; yet the Prophet’s forms and attributes cannot differ. Rather, the meaning of the hadith is: Whoever sees me in the form upon which I was created has seen me, for Satan cannot assume my form. For he, peace and blessings be upon him, did not say: ‘Whoever sees that he has seen me has seen me’; rather, he said: ‘Whoever sees me has seen me.’ And how could one who sees that he has seen him in his true form know that he saw him in that form, even if he believes that he saw him, unless he knows that this image is precisely his image? Yet no one has any way of knowing that.”
Al-Ḥāfiẓ said: “Some restricted the matter further, maintaining that one must see him in the form he had at the time of his death, such that even the number of his white hairs—which did not reach twenty—must be taken into account. The correct view is that it applies to all stages of his life, provided that it is his true form at some point, whether in his youth, manhood, middle age, or at the end of his life.”
Shaykh ʿAlī al-Qārī said in Sharḥ al-Shamāʾil (2/293): “It has also been said that this is restricted to the people of his time, peace and blessings be upon him; that is, whoever sees me in a dream, Allah Most High will grant him success in seeing me while awake. The remoteness of this interpretation is evident, besides its incompatibility with the general force of ‘whoever’ in”