Yusuf · Makki · ayah 28 of 111

Yusuf 12:28

فَلَمَّا رَءَا قَمِيصَهُۥ قُدَّ مِن دُبُرٍ قَالَ إِنَّهُۥ مِن كَيْدِكُنَّ ۖ إِنَّ كَيْدَكُنَّ عَظِيمٌ

“So when he [i.e., her husband] saw his shirt torn from the back, he said, "Indeed, it is of your [i.e., women's] plan. Indeed, your plan is great [i.e., vehement].”

Saheeh International

Essence

Seeing the shirt torn from behind, the husband clears Yusuf and blames the scheme, widening it to women: 'your scheming is great'.

A reflection

Whose words are these?

Few lines of the Qur'an are quoted out of their setting as often as this one. 'Indeed, your scheming is great' gets passed around as if it were the Qur'an's own verdict on women.

Read the ayah again. It begins with a verb: qāla, he said. Most commentators say the speaker is the husband. Some say it was the witness from her family. Either way, the sentence belongs to a man in the story. He is speaking in the heat of the moment, about a wrong just done in his own house.

The Qur'an reports many voices without adopting them. It records Pharaoh saying: I am your lord most high (79:24). It records the brothers' lies, and the boasts of the arrogant. Reporting a sentence is not the same as endorsing it as a general truth.

That does not settle everything, and honesty requires saying so. Some classical scholars did read the line as a wider observation about women, since Allah relates it without objection. Others pushed back, as the next reflections show. But no one confused it with Allah speaking in His own voice.

The first step in reading any ayah is to ask who is talking. Here the answer is a betrayed husband who has just seen the evidence. His words tell us much about him, and about the moment. They were never meant to be a slogan.

The same care applies whenever a verse is quoted at you, or by you, as a weapon. Ask who is speaking, to whom, and in what moment. Then ask what the surah as a whole does with those words. Very often the surrounding ayat answer the misuse before anyone else needs to.

Hold one more word from his sentence: ʿaẓīm, great. Its root is bone, the hard frame under the flesh. We will come back to what is truly bone in this story.

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.