Yusuf · Makki · ayah 25 of 111

Yusuf 12:25

وَٱسْتَبَقَا ٱلْبَابَ وَقَدَّتْ قَمِيصَهُۥ مِن دُبُرٍ وَأَلْفَيَا سَيِّدَهَا لَدَا ٱلْبَابِ ۚ قَالَتْ مَا جَزَآءُ مَنْ أَرَادَ بِأَهْلِكَ سُوٓءًا إِلَّآ أَن يُسْجَنَ أَوْ عَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌ

“And they both raced to the door, and she tore his shirt from the back, and they found her husband at the door. She said, "What is the recompense of one who intended evil for your wife but that he be imprisoned or a painful punishment?"”

Saheeh International

Essence

Yusuf runs for the door with her behind him; she tears his shirt from the back, her husband is there, and she accuses first.

A reflection

A back turned on sin

The tear is in the back of the shirt: min dubur, from behind. The verb, qaddat, names a particular kind of tearing. The lexicons say qadd is a cut down the length, with the grain, like a thong cut from a hide. A crosswise cut has another name. So this is a long rip, the kind a hand makes when it catches cloth and is dragged forward by someone pulling away.

The word for 'back' has a history. In battle, to show your dubur was to flee. It is usually a word of shame: the coward's back. Here it is the opposite. The back of this shirt shows a man who turned away from sin, and the cloth itself records which way he was facing.

The same root gives the word for pondering. Tadabbur is looking at the back end of a matter: where it leads, how it finishes. The lexicons record a poet mocking people who grasped a matter only in hindsight, once the harm had come. Yusuf did his tadabbur before the harm. One ayah earlier he had said it: wrongdoers do not flourish (12:23). He looked at the end of this road, and turned his back on its beginning.

There is a quiet lesson in the cloth. Nobody planned that tear as evidence. It was the trace of an honest movement. When a person truly runs from wrong, the running leaves marks, and those marks can later speak for him.

Hold that picture: a long tear down the back of a running man's shirt. In the next ayah it will be read aloud.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.