12. Yusuf

Alif lām rāÌ. Those are the verses of the Book that makes plain: [the interpretation of] this has already been mentioned.

We will tell thee the most beautiful of tales. What a beautiful tale is the tale of Joseph! It is the tale of the passionate and the object of passion, the talk of separation and union. It wants the pain-stricken to read the tale of those in pain. It wants the passionate to report about the pain of passion and the burning of the passionate. It wants the burnt so that the burning of the longing may leave a trace. I am the slave of the yearner who lights up the fire of longing at the top of the Friend's street. I envy the eye that rains down tears at separation in love for the Beloved. I scatter spirit and heart before the lost-hearted one who tells the story of the lost-hearted. In the city my heart inclines, my dear, to him who sings your passion's tale, my dear. On the day when the seed of passion's pain was planted in the hearts of the familiar, the heart of Jacob the prophet was on the highway of this talk. He found flourishing in disengagement and solitariness, he took himself into the crucible of discipline and self-purification, and he became receptive to the seed of passion's pain. When the seed reached the earth of his heart, the water of “He sprinkled them with some of His light” nurtured it until the jasmine of the Covenant grew up. Then, as a pretext, the beauty of Joseph was made his kiblah, and his mortal nature was given ac- cess to its own kind. This cry went out: “Jacob's throat has been hung by the noose of desire for Joseph.” Within the curtain of jealousy that center point of the Haqiqah said, “Call Me Arsalan so that no one will know who I am.”

When Joseph said to his father, " O my father, surely I saw eleven stars and the sun and the moon. I saw them prostrating to me. " Ibn ʿAbbās said, " The eleven stars allude to the eleven brothers. " God is saying, " The stars are bright by themselves and people take to the road by them, " which is in His words, " By the stars they are guided " [16:16]. " In the same way Joseph's brothers had the brightness of prophecy, and within them was found the guidance of the people. " Their treachery toward their brother and their envy toward him are minor sins of the sort that occur for prophets. The wisdom in this is that the world's folk may come to know that the faultless is God, who is one and unique, and all other things have faults. In this meaning they have sung, I am the faulty and my Lord is pure- my faultiness is evidence of the Pure. It was said to Ḥasan, " Does the man of faith have envy? " He said, " What has made you forget the sons of Jacob? " Someone may say that Joseph was an immature child when he saw this dream, and it is known in the Shariah that no rulings apply to the act of a child. Since his act has no ruling, how can his dream have a ruling? The answer is that if the child's act is achieved by his own intention and aim, it can be attributed to his susceptibility to shortcoming and defect. But a dream is a divine showing, and in that children and adults are the same.

['O my son] do not relate your vision to your brothers, lest they plot against you some plot: this is one of those undifferentiated inspirations (ilhāmāt), for an Unseen form of the disengaged spiritual realities may appear, in a universal way that transcends time, to the spirit and the vestige of it then arrives in the heart and it does not become individuated in the soul by differentiation until knowledge of it, as it is, comes about, whereupon there follows fear and caution from it in the soul if it should be something unpleasant or rejoicing and gladness if it should be desirable. This kind of inspiration is called 'warning' or 'good tiding'. He [Jacob], peace be upon him, therefore feared what would happen before it happened and so forbade him [Joseph] from informing them of his vision as a precaution. But his cautiousness may also be due to the vision being proof of his [Joseph's] exalted and honoured status and his greater capacity over his brothers. He [Jacob] thus feared that they would be envious of him once they sensed that [privileged status].

Thus, will your Lord prefer you: that is, just like that election, by granting [Joseph] that tremendous vision, so He elects you [O Muḥammad] for prophethood, for truthful visions, especially the like of these, are the prelude to prophethood, and so he came to understand from his vision that he is one of the beloved [of God] for whom unveilings precede their wayfaring; and perfect His grace upon you, of prophethood and kingship.

Verily in Joseph and his brethren are signs for those who inquire, that is, glorious signs for those who inquire about their story and come to know it, [signs] which will prove to them, first, that pure [divine] election is a matter exclusive to God's wish, exalted be He, and is not connected to the effort made by a striving person or the will of a seeker, so that they might come to know the levels of pre-eternal preparedness; and, second, that the one for whom God wills good none can avert [that good] and the one whom He protects none can cause him misfortune or seek [to inflict on] him evil, so that their certainty and their trust might be strengthened and that they might witness the self-disclosures of His acts and His attributes; and, third, that Satan's plotting and his misguidance are something from which no one, not even prophets, are safe, so that they might be on their guard from him. But much more than all that is that these [signs] will apprise them by way of understanding - which is the transferral to the mental - of their states at the beginning, at the end and in-between the two and of the modality of their wayfaring to God in order to incite their yearning and their will, to sharpen their insight and to strengthen their resolve. That is because the similitude of Joseph is that of the heart which is prepared, of extreme beauty, dearly beloved to his father, Jacob the intellect, envied by his brothers from another mother (ʿallāt), namely, the five external senses and the five internal ones as well as [that of] anger (ghaḍab) and lust (shahwa), [all being] the children of the soul, except for the memory, which is not envious of him and does not seek to harm him, leaving eleven [in total], matching their number. As for their envy of him and their seeking to harm him, this is [to be understood as being] through that these [senses] are by their nature drawn to their pleasures and appetites, and impede the use of the intellect, the reflective faculty, for the actualisation of the perfections of the heart such as forms of knowledge and [noble] character traits, and are averse to that. They only want it [the intellect] to use them to actualise corporeal pleasures and the appetites of those animal faculties. But there is no doubt that reflection (fikr) looks more to the heart [than to the senses] and it is more intensely and more abundantly inclined to the actualisation of felicities of the heart such as forms of knowledge and virtues [than to those of the senses]. That is the significance of their saying:

'Surely Joseph and his brother are dearer to our father than we are: his brother [Benjamin] is the practical rational faculty from Joseph's mother the heart, Rachel the self-reproaching soul whom Jacob the heart married after the death of Leah the commanding soul. They said 'surely Joseph and his brother [�]', because just as the intellect entails perfecting of the heart with forms of knowledge and gnoses, it also entails perfecting this faculty by inferring all manner of virtues such as beautiful character traits and noble deeds. Their description of him [Jacob] as being in misguidance, which is to be remote from what is correct, by saying: Lo! our father is in plain misguidance, is a deficiency of rational consideration on their part and [an indication of] the remoteness of his way of actualising corporeal pleasures from theirs. Their casting of him [Joseph] into the bottom of a well is their [the senses'] mastery over the heart and their drawing of it towards the lower aspect by the occurrence [in the heart] of love for the body and correspondences with it until it was [finally] cast into the bottom of the well of corporeal nature. Except that he [Joseph] had been dressed in a shirt from Paradise which Gabriel, peace be upon him, had brought to Abraham on that day when he was denuded and cast into the fire and had dressed him in. Isaac had inherited it [from Abraham] and from him Jacob inherited it and attached it to an amulet around his [Joseph's] neck. So Gabriel came to him in the well, took it out and dressed him in it, for otherwise the water would have drowned him and his private parts would have been exposed, as has been related. It [the shirt] is an allusion to the attribute of original preparedness and the light of primordial nature, which is what preserved Abraham from the fire and shielded him by the will of God such that it was coolness and safety for him. As for their [the senses'] drawing of the intellect down so that it considers what pertains to livelihood and the actualisation of the means for that and that it orients itself towards that [pursuit], that is the significance of their words:

so that your father might be solely concerned with you, and that thereafter you might be a righteous folk', that is, in terms of organising livelihood and the preparing of the means thereto according to what is desired. As for their tempting of the intellect away from the heart by means of beguiling satanic insinuations and ego-centric censures, despite the intellect's aversion thereto, that is the significance of what they say when they are tempting Jacob away from him [with the statement]: