Yusuf · Makki · ayah 85 of 111

Yusuf 12:85

قَالُوا۟ تَٱللَّهِ تَفْتَؤُا۟ تَذْكُرُ يُوسُفَ حَتَّىٰ تَكُونَ حَرَضًا أَوْ تَكُونَ مِنَ ٱلْهَـٰلِكِينَ

“They said, "By Allāh, you will not cease remembering Joseph until you become fatally ill or become of those who perish."”

Saheeh International

Essence

The sons swear their father will waste away remembering Yusuf, and the rare word they choose describes exactly how he has held his lost son.

A reflection

The line everyone hears as cruelty

Most readers hear this sentence in the brothers' voices from the start of the story. The same men who threw a boy into the dark now snap at the old man for still crying about it. It sounds like impatience. It confirms what we already think of them.

The commentaries do not hear it so simply. One narration-based reading says that at this point his sons softened towards him. They spoke, it says, out of gentleness and pity. Another early report calls the same words ignorance and wrong. A legal commentary holds both together: their aim was to stop him weeping, out of compassion, even though they were the cause of it.

That last reading is the uncomfortable one, and probably the truest. Real concern and real guilt can sit in one sentence. These men are not acting. They have watched their father's eyes go white. They are frightened for his body. And they still cannot say the one thing that would end it.

Nine years after a younger son vanished on a gap year abroad, his grown siblings book their father a weekend by the sea. It is to get his head straight, they say. They mean it. One of them also cannot bear the photograph in the hall any longer, for reasons he has never said aloud.

The ayah does not say which motive was larger. It records the sentence and lets us notice who is saying it. So the reader's familiar picture, villains being villains again, is too easy. What is on the page is harder to dismiss. These are people who love someone, and who need his pain to stop for their own sake as well as his.

Before giving anyone the advice in this ayah, it is worth asking which half of it is for them.

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.