Yusuf · Makki · ayah 44 of 111

Yusuf 12:44

قَالُوٓا۟ أَضْغَـٰثُ أَحْلَـٰمٍ ۖ وَمَا نَحْنُ بِتَأْوِيلِ ٱلْأَحْلَـٰمِ بِعَـٰلِمِينَ

“They said, "[It is but] a mixture of false dreams, and we are not learned in the interpretation of dreams."”

Saheeh International

Essence

The king's experts call his dream a fistful of tangled stalks that no one could read; the problem was not the dream.

A reflection

When experts cannot answer, they call the question meaningless

It is easy to picture the king's court as a room of fools. Soothsayers and stargazers who knew nothing, shown up by a prophet.

The commentaries read them more shrewdly than that. One points out that they did not deny knowing how to interpret dreams. They divided dreams into two kinds: the orderly, which can be read, and the tangled, which cannot. Then they placed the king's dream in the second kind. That way, their failure became a property of the dream rather than a gap in their skill.

Another commentary notes they used a plural for a single dream: tangled dreams, as you might say a man rides horses when he owns one. They were piling it on, to make the dream sound as meaningless as possible. A third suggests they may simply have wanted to soothe the king, to wipe the worry from his chest.

All of these are very human moves. When you cannot answer a question, declare the question unanswerable.

A patient has had pain for two years. The consultant has run every test and found nothing. In the letter home he writes: non-specific, probably stress. It may even be true. But it is also the sentence that lets the file be closed.

The chiefs were not lying, exactly. Dreams can be muddled. The ayah does not mock them. It simply lets the next few ayat show that this one was perfectly clear, to someone who could read it.

Sometimes the honest answer is not this means nothing. It is: I cannot see what this means.

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.