Yusuf · Makki · ayah 30 of 111

Yusuf 12:30

۞ وَقَالَ نِسْوَةٌ فِى ٱلْمَدِينَةِ ٱمْرَأَتُ ٱلْعَزِيزِ تُرَٰوِدُ فَتَىٰهَا عَن نَّفْسِهِۦ ۖ قَدْ شَغَفَهَا حُبًّا ۖ إِنَّا لَنَرَىٰهَا فِى ضَلَـٰلٍ مُّبِينٍ

“And women in the city said, "The wife of al-ʿAzeez is seeking to seduce her slave boy; he has impassioned her with love. Indeed, we see her [to be] in clear error."”

Saheeh International

Essence

The household hushed it up, yet the city soon repeats the one detail the hush was meant to bury: she was pursuing him.

A reflection

They were not as shocked as they sounded

The picture most of us carry is of respectable women, scandalised. A great lady has disgraced herself with a servant, and decent society is appalled.

The next ayah gives their talk a name, and it is not outrage. It calls it their scheming.

The commentaries explain why. One account says word of Yusuf's beauty had reached them. They spoke this way so that she would be forced to show him to them. Another says she had confided in them and asked for secrecy, and they spread it. A third says backbiting is called scheming because it is done out of sight, the way a plot is.

So the disapproval was real, but it was not the whole of it. Underneath the tutting was a wish to see.

A staff kitchen at lunchtime. Someone mentions a public figure caught in an affair. Everyone agrees it is shameful and that they would never look at those photographs. By two o'clock, half of them have found the photographs on their phones.

None of them is lying when they disapprove. They are simply not telling the whole truth about what the disapproval is doing for them.

That is worth knowing about our own moral comments on other people's falls. Sometimes they guard a standard. Sometimes they are a way of staying near the thing while appearing to stand back from it. The women of the city were about to find out which theirs was, with a knife in one hand.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.