Yusuf · Makki · ayah 27 of 111

Yusuf 12:27

وَإِن كَانَ قَمِيصُهُۥ قُدَّ مِن دُبُرٍ فَكَذَبَتْ وَهُوَ مِنَ ٱلصَّـٰدِقِينَ

“But if his shirt is torn from the back, then she has lied, and he is of the truthful."”

Saheeh International

Essence

If the tear is at the back, she lied and he is truthful: the shirt Yusuf ran in is allowed to speak.

A reflection

The cloth that speaks

One early view, recorded in the commentaries, says the witness in these ayat was not a person at all. The witness was the tear in the shirt.

A later commentator weighs this. It cannot be the literal meaning, he says, since the witness is called 'from her family'. But as a figure of speech it is sound Arabic. The tongue of a situation, he writes, is more eloquent than the tongue of speech. The Arabs often gave words to things that cannot talk. He quotes one of their sayings. The wall said to the peg: why do you split me? The peg said: ask the one who is hammering me.

Imagine the shirt asked the same. Why are you torn? Ask the hand that pulled me from behind.

Notice how little the shirt needed. No eloquence, no rank, no friends in the household. Only the plain fact of which way it had been pulled.

That is what this ayah does. It lets a piece of cloth finish the argument. She had words, rank and the first hearing. He had one plain sentence. Between them hangs a shirt, and its back is open from collar to hem.

There is something steadying in this for anyone whose word is doubted. Your own voice may not carry. You may be the junior, the outsider, the one with no witness. But the traces of what you actually did are speaking all the time, in a language people can read when they finally look.

Hold that picture: a torn shirt held up at the door, saying what its wearer could not prove.

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.